Hello and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. On behalf of OTC Markets, we are very pleased you have joined us for our 3-day Precious Metals and Critical Mineral Conference. The next presentation of the day is from Critical Metals. Please note you may submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for a one-on-one meeting by clicking Book a Meeting. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome Tom McNamara, Director of Corporate Development and IR of Critical Metals, which trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol CRML. Welcome, Tom.
Tom, welcome to the
TC and everyone currently attending. I've been with Critical Metals for one year, and we're making tremendous progress. Just a quick overview of I'm sure everyone is aware of what's going on in the critical metals market, with China having a total stranglehold on there, and how the West is trying to realign all the supply chains. We consider Tanbreez to be a major solution to all those endeavors for that. I'm gonna move on to a timeline. This is important. We've made some major milestones in the last several months. I would put them kind of in order of importance. Our field testing has demonstrated that.
Tom, I'm gonna jump in real quickly. We can hear you just fine, but we are hearing an echo. Can you mute your computer speakers for me?
How's that?
All righty. Keep going. Thanks so much.
All right. The major milestones we've achieved in the last 6 months or so have been, 1, through our own processing and with third-party audits, eudialyte is actually able to be processed commercially. That's a major milestone from our pilot plant. 2, our JV with Romania is the first mine to magnet full production of an entire supply chain for the West, which is fully dedicated to NATO, which I'll talk to in more detail. Our, the major one is also all of our lab tests continue to demonstrate that not only is Tanbreez getting bigger, but it's also getting a lot better in quality and what we expect to get out of it once we start mining it.
When we look at this, I know it's a busy chart. What we've done recently is most important, we've secured 92.5% of Tanbreez ownership, which we announced earlier in the past week or so, and we currently have a bid out for European Lithium, which was kind of a sibling company, the balance of that. The whole strategic drive was to consolidate our positions. That 7.5%, when we're successful with the transaction, will bring us to 100% of ownership of Tanbreez, which is very important for us. Major things happening this year when the weather breaks will be that, we are gonna have up to 5 rigs drilling.
We're constructing a core shack and core laboratory and hope to have our pilot plant there as soon as we can get so we can start doing pre-construction activity. Also a major milestone for us later this year, we'll be able to getting several tons, and I mean tons, not grams or kilograms, but tons of material to our offtake partners. Hopefully they can get them back to us, and that will demonstrate the actual full mine to magnet supply line that we envision in future. We're gonna spend about $30 million this year. We have ample cash on our balance sheet. European Lithium, if successful, will bring a lot of cash to our balance sheet, we still are in talks with many different institutions across the world for potential financing operations.
Now looking more broadly into the future, gonna advance to the Romanian joint venture, which we announced late last year. The significance of this is half of phase 1 of Tanbreez will be dedicated to our joint venture. It's a 50-50 joint venture. We are gonna be carried for 100% of the CapEx. The reason Romania fits so well with this is, one, they have a very well-defined and fully integrated nuclear system, which is important with rare earths processing. That's something, for example, China has and what's give them a major advantage, also France. That is going to be literally kind of going backwards. We're gonna be producing the highest grade magnets, military grade magnets and coatings. Since it's gonna be coming from one source, Tanbreez, we can cater that to the customer's needs.
That's why we feel it important that Tanbreez deserves its own fully integrated supply chain. Romania is a NATO, it's EU member, a strong NATO member, and our venture is going to be dedicated specifically to NATO countries or NATO members for our offtake. We're going to have 50% of that on the end of the process, so that's a very good strategic benchmark for us and for the industry. The again, I spoke a little bit about this before, but our metallurgical tests continue to improve. We're getting a much better understanding of kind of the core of Tanbreez, and Tanbreez is so large, we're talking about 50 years of mining life just in what we would consider the core of it.
From an economic standpoint, our grades continue to improve, and most importantly, our purity levels have gone up to almost 4 nines, so 99.9995%. Again, that is the highest quality magnets you could possibly produce. We're speaking about the highest aerospace and military applications, and in the future, robotics. These really speak to what we have in terms of the heavy rare earths that really makes Tanbreez the most strategically important rare earths deposit in the world. We all know about China and their domination. This, you know, continues to be a major trade issue.
We'll see what Trump and Xi have to discuss about this. The China's dug in on this, we're trying to contribute our part to building out a supply chain to replace them as fast as we can. Again, we believe that Tanbreez is the cornerstone for that entire endeavor. Take a closer look at Tanbreez. Again, it's the best mining asset I've seen in my career, it's certainly the best rare earths deposit in the world. Just a little background on Tanbreez. It is far north, but the deposit, you know, Greenland is, but we're in the southwest portion. We do enjoy the Atlantic current. The weather is not that bad. It's in a fjord which can handily take Panamax-sized ships, easy shipping lanes to our markets.
We had a preliminary economic study that's been out on Tanbreez. It's a very simplistic look at the asset. We've learned a lot from it. This basically proves in a China-dominated world, you know, 10 years ago that it would be an economic endeavor. We've been proving through our pilot tests in all of our assays that the economics have a lot more upside than what we have here, and we're working on our feasibility study, which we hope to get out by the end of this year. It's a very vigorous process we're going through and, again, we're putting a lot into it right now, and we hope to have it out by the end of this year and should look a lot different than what we see here.
This is a good look at Tanbreez on the, on the lower part of this. You can see 1, the fjord there, it's extraordinarily deep, the hill deposit. When I see this is all ore. There's virtually no stripping ratio. We're right at the port. The stripping ratio is great for economics, and it's great in terms of overall waste. We have gravity in our favor. We expect to use quite a bit of conveying systems to get down to the port. Also, a major benefit of the overall operation is we plan to be 100% hydropower or as much hydro as we can.
We would expect between the low strip ratio, hydropower operating the assets, and magnetic separation only in our concentrating that this will be the most environmentally friendly mine on the planet. Again, it's a pretty simple process. This is again all from the PEA. Our asset continues to improve and gets strategically more important. This is a little bit on gallium. This is one of the rare earths that China has completely banned from export, period, and there's no indication they're gonna open that up anytime soon. We've been finding more and more of it. Do a quick look at our lithium deposit, which is a JV with European Lithium. I can't say much about the deal that's going on. This is a lithium asset in Austria. It's fully backed by a contract with BMW for the offtake.
It's fairly simple operation. It's again, it's a big strategic asset for Europe in that it'll be the first fully mine to battery operation in Europe. It is in Austria. BMW is taking the offtake. It's gonna be processed or tolled in Saudi Arabia. This is a significant deal for the company as well as Saudi Arabia. This goes all the way back to 2023. We've been have had relationships with the Saudi government for quite a while. That's really it for the slides, I'll wrap it up there, I look forward to any questions.
All right, Tom, I see two questions in the Q&A for you. Are you able to see those?
Yeah. I see the I'll first go the Ryan Tubey. Saudi JV is still going through its finalization in terms of all the ability and contracting. I would say it's definitely gonna be after the Romanian plant. It is gonna be a smaller version of the Romanian plant. It's still our technology that's gonna be utilized. The difference is obviously it's gonna be in Saudi Arabia, and it's only gonna go to salts from a standpoint. I don't think construction would begin until probably two years from now, maybe 18 months. Let's see. Sorry, I'm going through these. I'm gonna jump around. I can't. Ryan Kenney, how do you see a combination of Greenland EU native jurisdictions influencing our financing or capital costs?
I think, 1, as I discussed, Southwest Greenland enjoys the Atlantic current. The quietly, we haven't heard much on the large political scale between the Trump administration, Denmark, and Greenland. There is a lot going on on the ground in Greenland. There's a lot of money that's being spent. We expect that it's gonna be a very active and for our major CapEx items, the port being the biggest, that is the 1 that we thought at 1 point we'd have to do it alone, but we're having so many people interested in that port as it will be multipurpose. It's really, is aiding us in terms of capital costs and financing and even cost.
The second, another big item for us would be hydro and hydro linkups, which is becoming a much bigger and bigger multipurpose thing for the country with some of the biggest countries and companies looking at that, so we expect it to get very competitive. The EPMs, the key milestones over the next 12 to 18 months will be working out our capital program this year on the ground in Greenland, specifically Core Lab, Core Shack, pilot plant, and getting our batch samples off to our significant tonnage to our off-take partners. From both values, this is for George Barton. It's a hard one to answer. I think we obviously thought European Lithium is undervalued hence the bid.
I mean, yeah, the more as we keep our heads down and progress Tanbreez closer and closer to commercial production, we've been very busy ticking a lot of boxes, meticulously going through this process. Again, with the milestones I laid out for this year, it's just gonna become increasingly clear how strategic and how valuable the Tanbreez asset is. Let's see. Production, the late 2028 and profitability, just look at the concentrate grades. Pilot plant we still hope for, first half of this year. This question about de-bottlenecking stage at Tanbreez or anything, we have not come through that yet. Again, no strip ratio. We've got the concentrating figured out. The mining is the easiest part of it and the plant.
With that said, we expect to use the highest technology available in pit sorting, et cetera. It's gonna be way down in the cost curve, but I think it'll be the lowest cost operation, period. The BMW off-take is extremely important for Tanbreez. Yep, pilot plant's covered. Too early to say. Well, I, a lot of these, your questions I'm not at liberty to answer on this form. This is a very important question, Sam. The $30 million acceleration forward, pull forward. Several things that we've done which is very important for on the ground operations where I spend a lot of my time working through.
We announced last year that we won the successful test, importantly, the going up to 92.5% and our target towards 100% of the Tanbreez asset is extremely important on the ground. Last year, we announced that we were making an offer to invest in partnership with the largest diversified multi-task construction company in southwest Greenland. That is also really helping to facilitate how we progress forward. Those are all things we've been working towards, again, to get this up as smoothly and as meticulously as possible. We're on the ground. Despite the headlines from several months, things are going very well in Greenland. The 2026 program designed to both expand and de-risk the resource.
I think the PEA is obsolete at this point. You can go through what we have been announcing in the past year, it again points to that. It's just very different. I call it delineation, not really definition. We're figuring out exactly how to go after it. With the grades and recoveries we're finding, we're basically looking for, we think we found the heart of it, and we're trying to get high grading out of our nomenclature internally. Tanbreez's size is such that a high grade portion of Tanbreez is decades of production, the grades are extremely attractive. We're just trying to get a better understanding as we're getting closer to mining it.
It's back to the pilot plant. No, nothing the first half of this year. It's just, it's already May. Hopefully soon. It's been colder in Greenland than expected, but the real important aspect of the pilot plant is not where it is, it's that it gets Tanbreez material to our off-take partners. That timeline is not changing. The pilot plant is extremely important, but is a fungible, movable asset.