Myself and my team, we cover the rare earth critical minerals. As we've said for some of the other presentations, we're analysts here at William Blair. You can always go to a complete list of the research disclosures or potential conflicts. Just go to our website at williamblair.com. With that, my pleasure today to have both Alex Guthrie, IR, and Mark Smith, both of NioCorp. We've known Mark now for quite some time. I think it's one of the more interesting stories. They have, I think, a world-class project that I know we're going to hear more on today. Some of you maybe in your prior lives have run across Mark at Molycorp. I think we've both done this a long time, either by our lack of hair or gray hair, whatever you want to call it.
Mark's going to walk us through, I think, what to me is one of the most interesting upstream stories, I think, in the critical minerals space. Thanks, Mark.
Good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for coming out. This is a story that I love to tell, so I'm going to try my very hardest to conclude my remarks within about 20 minutes and leave enough for any questions that you may have. If you're more comfortable coming up afterwards, that's fine as well. It's all about communication, as Bob knows. We are NioCorp, and NioCorp is all about a project in southeast Nebraska that I'll tell you about. We are publicly traded on NASDAQ, ticker symbol NB. If you know your chemistry, if you passed your chemistry test in high school, you'll know that NB is the symbol on the periodic table of elements for niobium. That's how to think of NioCorp, is we're primarily there for niobium. We have all of our normal forward-looking statements.
This slide is where I'll spend a lot of our time today. We'll start over in that green column, because that really kind of explains the project at a very high level. As you can see, located in the very southeast corner of Nebraska. We're about an hour and 15 minutes south of Omaha and about an hour south and a little bit east of Lincoln. Two very good-sized cities that will provide significant housing, labor, everything else for the project. Our project is actually located right next to a state highway. What we like to say is that we're a rural project, but we're not a remote project by any means. Power, gas, water, highways, all right there. We're fully permitted. That's another very unique thing that we get to say that a lot of U.S. mining companies don't get to say. Very proud of that.
Our permits are in hand. These aren't going to be issued. These are issued permits. We're ready to go. We have everything we need to start construction. If we take a look at the bottom, now we get into the periodic table of elements again. You can see the products that we're very interested in. I've already said we're there primarily for niobium. We have the third richest ore grade, either under development or in production in the world today. This is a real ore body.
It's a carbonatite geologic resource. That means that you never know what else you're going to find in there, but we've had the very good fortune, through working with metallurgical firms like SGS out of Lakefield, Canada, to discover that not only do we have niobium down there, but we have scandium, we have titanium, and we actually have some rare earths. It's a mixture of bastnäsite and monazite, which if you've got some experience in the rare earth space, you'll know that the bastnäsite tends to be very well. It's got a lot of NdPr. I'll simplify it. The NdPr is Neodymium- Praseodymium. That's your base rare earth compound that you use for a rare earth permanent magnet.
Because we have the monazite in addition to the bastnäsite, we also can produce Dy, which is dysprosium, and Tb, which is terbium. Why are those important in the magnetic rare earth space? Although that NdPr makes just a fantastic permanent magnet, when it gets above 200 degrees Fahrenheit, all of a sudden you lose all your magnetic capabilities in that magnet. The way to get a higher temperature magnet is you add small amounts of dysprosium or terbium. It's very, very important. If you think about our fighter jets, do you think they want to use just the NdPr magnet by itself? Absolutely no way.
They want the higher temperature capacity in those magnets, because once you get above 200 degrees Fahrenheit on those magnets, not only do they lose their magnet activity, but when it goes back below 200 degrees, you don't get it back. It's gone. We can't afford those types of situations. EVs, wind turbines, the humanoid robots, the manufacturing robots. These are things, just think of the volumes of those materials for magnets. That's why Dy and Tb are so important. If we take another quick look at these elements that we're going to produce, we import 100% of the niobium that we need in the United States today. We import 100% of the scandium, the Sc, that we need in the United States today.
We import 100% of the Dy, the dysprosium, and we import 100% of the Tb or the terbium. It gets a little bit better with NdPr. We only import about 95% of what we need for that material, and we import about 85% of what we need for the titanium in the United States. These are all critical and strategic minerals, almost by definition, because we don't produce them to a large extent in this country. Needless to say, the White House, the Department of Defense, are very aware of this project. They can speak to it by name, and they want to see this project up and running.
That's not only driven by our federal government, but it's also driven by the fact that the Chinese, as everybody probably knows, cut off the export of things like the scandium, the dysprosium, and the terbium as of August 4th, 2025. They produce 100% of that material for the world today. This has become a very important issue and this is why the whole term 'rare earths' has captured everybody's attention again. I've been in rare earths for about 38 years, so this is the third time I'm seeing this cycle in the rare earths space. It's exciting this time because I'll tell you that the traction that we're feeling out of the whole world to get this onshoring and less reliance on one country issue off of our plate is real.
When I go to D.C., where I'm living about every other week right now, it's the both sides of the aisle support this concept of getting these critical strategic minerals up and running on full supply chain basis in the United States. Europe's looking at doing the same thing. Japan's looking at doing the same thing. Australia's looking at doing the same thing. We're going to have to work together to coordinate all this. Not one country can handle everything on its own. It's going to be some interesting times. It's certainly dynamic times, but a lot of fun right now. The next column over, there's two figures on there that are more important than the other two, the top one and the bottom one.
We had the very good fortune in 2025 of raising and bringing in over $500 million of equity or some form of cash into the company. That has filled our treasury in a good way, and you'll see what that means from a project financing standpoint in just a minute. Then the bottom number, the zero. That's probably one of my favorite numbers. It has zero debt and zero convertible debt on our balance sheet right now. We've been this way for well over a year now. This is the cleanest our balance sheet has been for a long time. We're very proud of that, and it gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of where we're going next. The third column over is interesting.
I'll let you read through that, but it basically says we have a great ore body and we have people who have actually produced these minerals before. This isn't new to us. We've gotten our hands dirty already. We know what kind of little art it takes to produce these rare earths. I'll tell you that after being in the mining industry for over 45 years now, processing and converting these rare earths into their oxide form is one of the most complicated pieces of mineral processing there is in the mining industry. If you don't have experience with it, you're going to struggle with it. It's going to take you years to figure out how to actually produce these high-purity oxide forms of the rare earths. The right-hand column, another one that we're pretty proud of.
In April, we announced. It was non-binding but it basically puts all of our production, all of those elements in their final customer form under a commercial contract. We basically will end up with two contracts at the end of the day. One that we've had in existence, it's an enforceable contract with ThyssenKrupp out of Germany. They'll be purchasing half of our niobium. Then the remainder of all of our products is under a non-binding agreement with Traxys North America right now. We're very quickly coming to the conclusion of an enforceable contract. Red lines are going back and forth. We're very close on that. I've done business with Traxys forever. I know we will reach a conclusion on that and it'll be good for both parties at the end of the day.
Commercially, we're kind of there and Ex-Im is very happy with the status of our offtake agreements. The middle box, $10 million we got from the Department of Defense last August. $8 million of that was designated to do technical work programs to further our efforts with getting the Ex-Im loan. The other $2 million of it had to do with the Department of Defense would like for NioCorp to become the owner of the scandium full supply chain in the United States, and we've taken that a long ways as well. If we have time, we'll get into that more. Bottom right-hand picture there is all about U.S. Export-Import Bank. We've been working with them for a little over two years and 10 months now.
I would say, based on my opinion, I think we're within two to four months of having an authorized loan from the U.S. Export-Import board of directors. We're getting very close on that right now. If we go to the next slide, we'll show you what that means then. In terms of project financing, because we've really done all the technical work that's necessary to de-risk this project and we're kind of in that project financing mode. If we take a look at the stack on the left-hand side, this is very simplified project financing, but it shows debt at 65% and equity at 35%. We have that in writing from Ex-Im. We know that's the percentage that they're looking at. 65% of a $1.2 billion CapEx estimate from our 2022 feasibility study is $780 million. That's just simple math is all that is.
The equity bucket becomes $420 million. $1.2- $780 million, $420 million. If you look at the right-hand side of that slide, you'll see the money that we've raised and brought into the company, and that allows me, until any additional information comes in, to say that the project equity portion, that bucket is full. And we're fine there. We're going to formalize and get this Ex-Im loan authorized. We will still need to raise some more money because Ex-Im, like any other commercial bank, needs a lot of cash to support their loan. They need things like debt service reserve accounts. That's my best example. You got to have cash for that, and it has to be in a designated account for them. We'll need to raise a little bit more money to make sure we can service that loan.
We've come a long ways on project financing, bottom line. With the money that we have in the bank, and we're very close to getting the Ex-Im loan finalized, we sat down with Ex-Im in December and said, "We'd like to start some construction on this project as soon as we can. We have the money in the bank. You're going to force us to spend 100% of that equity piece of the project financing first before they're going to give us $1 of debt. Let us start that early." They said, "Absolutely, no problem." They're actually giving us $1 for $1 credit for what we're spending right now towards that project financing equation, which is a really good deal. We're now able to start what we call the Mine Portal project. It's an underground mine.
The Portal project takes us from the surface of the property down to the first level of hard rock. That's about a 9-1 0-month project all on its own. By starting early, this will probably give us a four to five-month jump or positive in the scheduling category. This makes a lot of sense. Again, Ex-Im's giving us $1 for $1 credit for what we're spending in this regard. This is a big project. The Portal project, just on the surface, will be the size of about an aircraft carrier, and it'll be going down 100 ft at a 15-degree angle. This is a significant excavation project just to put the portal in to get to the first level of hard rock. A little artist rendition on the left, so you can see what that portal looks like.
The picture a little bit on the upper right here, you can see the green shaded area. That's the property that we've actually purchased. We own the surface and the mineral rights for a full square mile out in Nebraska now, and that provides more than enough property for the above-ground facilities to conduct the underground mining, and provide us with well over 30 years of mine life before we would need more property. We get $1 for $1 credit for that with Ex-Im as well because that was part of our CapEx estimate. Spending the money on that made sense, and we'll get full credit from it from Ex-Im. These are things that we wanted to do. I don't know if you all go to the movies very often.
My wife tends to take me to movies where there's always a landowner with some mining company that wants to hold out and get that last dollar from you. That movie isn't going to happen here. This is done. We own all that property, and it was all done very respectfully and with full integrity. The property owners are happy. We're happy. It was a good combination. Here's what we'll be producing. You can just see what these products look like. We talk about these things because they're second nature to us, and a lot of people don't even know what these products look like. I won't spend the time today to go over the applications of all of these products because that would take another 45 minutes, maybe 60 minutes. This shows you who's taking what.
You can see that the niobium half goes to ThyssenKrupp in Germany, half goes to Traxys. Those are volumetric take-or-pay agreements. The scandium, titanium, and the magnetic rare earths will go to Traxys. We had a town hall out on site, and we really like to talk about this as much as we can because there's this thing called a social license that you have to have, especially in the mining industry, if you want to operate in the local community. Our social license is as strong as I've ever seen in my 45+ year career now. We had a town hall on December 5th. We had the Governor of Nebraska, Jim Pillen, who's on the left-hand side. He came out personally, stood at the podium, and spoke to the 600+ people we had at our town hall.
Very supportive of the project, the state of Nebraska has given us about a $200+ million tax package over a 10-year period as well, just to show support for the project. Senator Fischer, second from the left, she's the senior senator. She couldn't attend the event because she had another commitment, she put a video together and had us play the video for the audience. Again, extremely supportive of the project. She was really helpful getting us that $10 million of grant money from the Department of Defense. Senator Ricketts, third from the left, he's the junior senator. I like to give him a lot of grief about that because he's actually older than the senior senator. He was Governor for the two terms before Governor Pillen. He's been a huge supporter of the project.
He came out personally to the project as well, to the town hall, stood at the podium, praised NioCorp and the project as much as he could. The guy on the right is the current Chairman and CEO of the Ex-Im Bank, U.S. Export-Import Bank, John Jovanovic. He was scheduled to be on-site and attend the town hall personally as well. President Trump needed him in the Oval Office on that December 5th Friday, he had to cancel late Thursday. He put together a video for us Thursday evening, sent it to us Thursday evening, said, "Please play this to the crowd." I couldn't believe when I saw it Thursday night the level of support that he expresses very solidly in that video. That video is on our website, and it's in this slide deck.
You just need to hit that red button at the top. It's less than two minutes. I would strongly encourage you to listen to that, and you tell me if I should be as confident about Ex-Im as what I am. My first question when I watched it was, do you think he ran that by his lawyers? I mean, it's that strong. It's pretty encouraging. We've covered this already, so I won't cover it anymore, but this is what the individual products look like. That red, bright banner at the bottom goes through how import-dependent we are on all of these products. We talked about some DoD grant money, which we got from the Department of Defense. $2 million of that $10 million was intended to go to two parts of a scandium supply chain.
One is we have no capability in the U.S. of making scandium metal today, we are in the process of figuring that out. We've got the technology now that we want, we'll be testing that out probably in July. That'll be a huge part of the supply chain. The Department of Defense needs scandium in metallic form, we can't make it in the United States. The next part is with Lockheed Martin, we've announced all this publicly as well. Lockheed Martin has a new technology using scandium aluminum alloys, because of the electromagnetic capabilities of scandium, they can use scandium aluminum in the F-35s and the F-22 jets, it drastically improves the threat detection capabilities of these jets. That means that our pilots are safer because they can see what's coming in much better and much clearer.
The radius of the threat detection almost doubles. They can see 360 degrees around the plane now, rather than the old technology, which only allows them to see 180 degrees forward. Needless to say, the Department of Defense wants this technology in those jets now. This is moving along at a very rapid pace. This is just a little bit. It's complicated, this is the supply chain we're putting together in the United States, we're about 75% of the way there. We haven't really publicized this a lot. We're just doing it because the Department of Defense is asking us to do that. The Department of Defense is smiling because of how far along this supply chain is versus almost any other supply chain that they're trying to put together in the United States right now.
Some of the economics for the project. Now, remember, this is from 2022, we didn't have the rare earth production in the 2022 feasibility study, that'll be added. You're looking at a very robust economic project here, $2.8 billion on a pre-tax NPV. I like to look at pre-tax because we won't be paying taxes on this facility for probably about 10 years. You look at the upper right-hand side, that's the EBITDA over the 38-year mine life, $403 million per year average. You can see the $1.14 billion CapEx. The 38-year mine life is pretty impressive all by itself, keep in mind that that 38-year mine life involves about 10% of the resource size that we know today. This mine is actually going to be here for, we think, 300- 400 years, it could be longer than that.
That's just what we've drilled so far. This is a massive carbonatite resource. Well over 7,000 acres in aerial size, about 500 meters thick, about 1,500 meters thick. We don't know where the bottom is yet. We've drilled down that far, and that's where we say the bottom is, but we haven't reached the bottom, and our ore grade for niobium is getting richer as we go deeper and deeper. I want to save shareholder money and I want to get the underground mine developed. We'll put the drill rig down at the bottom where we're mining, and we'll drill from there. It's a lot cheaper to be that far down and drill as opposed to doing that right now. We'll find out just how deep it goes and how rich it gets as we get into the mining process itself. Here's our team.
It's a group of people that have been together for 20, 30 years. Unbelievable trust and integrity between each other. We operate on a consensus basis, which means we vet things, and vet things, and vet things before decisions are made. That's our culture. That's what we have today. I went a little longer than I wanted to. I'm about 24 minutes now rather than 20 minutes. I would welcome any questions that you may have. Yes, sir.
Gabby. You want to Gabby.
It's in the state of Nebraska, I like to joke around about this a little bit. Nebraska I would say is known for.
Could you repeat the question real quick, just so we can hear?
Two things in terms of business.
Mark, can you repeat the question real quick?
Yeah, how deep before we get to the minerals.
Nebraska is known for its farming and insurance. Everybody thinks of farming in Nebraska as the primary business, and it is. It's got a 75- 100-foot layer of topsoil, and it is really good topsoil. You get into limestone, and it goes down about 300 ft. You're at the carbonatite, and the carbonatite goes down at least 500 meters, and we think it'll end up being significantly more than that. Our underground mine will have to go down to the carbonatite. All of what we're mining in is hard rock, so it's a very safe underground mining situation. It's not like coal, which I've done as well. Soft rock is tough to do underground mining on. This is very safe. We've got good designs and good professionals that have put all that together. Yes?
Good. Maybe I'll ask one.
Sure.
Just the last thing you said, Mark, on the personnel. It seems like a pretty big project overall, the scope and all, but again, you've talked about your experience. You had that last slide that showed. I've been pressing on you about a couple of them. Maybe again, how you have the confidence of-- I know once you said you'll get the financing, you've talked about, hey, this should take two and a half, three years. Seemed like you have a lot of confidence to do a large project like this, and I think a lot of that's probably attributed to the team you have.
Yeah. Exactly. You can't do this project without the right team. I will say that these team members are hand-selected. I've done work with all these folks before. They've done big projects before. All of us have come from big companies where we're used to full project management systems, very systematic approaches to how you do your entire business. That's how we do things, and we know that each other wants to do those things. Although NioCorp can be viewed as a junior mining company, none of us have been junior miners before, so we don't know what that actually is. We're all about finding a good project, which we did, doing the technical work to de-risk that project. Now we're in the project financing step, and we can't wait to start building and then operating this facility. We know how to operate this facility.
We've all done that.
Again, it sounds like the timing you mentioned, two to four months. Maybe before anybody understands here, two to four months for-
Exactly.
The finance and such. The minute you get that, you're off to the races. You'll start.
We are off to the races. That's right.
Timing of how long do you think to maybe first production then at that point?
If everything goes well, that's how I have to view everything, right? Because I'm the chief cheerleading officer as well. If everything goes well, we should be able to start construction in late 2026. It'll be a three-year construction project, and according to our plans right now, we should be able to have about a 20% of an annual production rate in 2029, the latter quarter of 2029, and we should have a full year of production in 2030.
Of that, I know you've had some announcements already. It seems like people are already lining up at your door to partner, want to take the offtake.
Yeah.
Maybe hit on that a little bit because a lot of it, I think considerable amount, I would say, is already spoken for. Maybe touch on that.
Yeah. We're talking to a lot of people who are interested in this offtake. There's certain things like the terbium and the dysprosium, as an example. You can't find those anywhere other than China. We have a lot of people at the front door for that. We had to balance the timing requirements of getting the Ex-Im loan with how long it takes to get an individual offtake agreement with a company. That takes a long time, especially when you've got three years of construction to go yet. The customer isn't in a big hurry, whereas we are because we need it for loan purposes. We took a different route, and that's why we entered into that agreement with Traxys, because they will take that material, and they will do the entire package, except for what is going to go to ThyssenKrupp. They're taking everything.
It's just an easier way for us to get it done in a timeframe that allows Ex-Im to utilize those commercial agreements to calculate debt capacity and ability to repay.
Maybe just two more on just on the feasibility study, make sure people understand here. The last one was done in 2022, now, again, as an analyst, you mentioned briefly that didn't include what? Several of the rare earths.
Right.
It didn't include the higher pricing. What's the difference, do you think, between when this one comes out and the prior?
Those will all be big differences. Our revenue pie is going to get a lot larger because prices for everything, for all these products, has gone up, and we're adding the magnetic rare earths, NdPr, Tb, and Dy. Our new process flow diagram provides for six times the amount of titanium for sale. Those are all really positive things, will create a much bigger revenue pie. We have to redo the CapEx estimate as well to bring it up to 2026 standards. There's going to be inflation impacts to the $1.2 billion CapEx estimate, but I want to temper that a little bit by noting that the new process flow diagram allowed us to eliminate a sulfuric acid plant, which is $100 million of that CapEx.
We decided to change the mine plan from a twin shaft going vertically down to twin ramp, which is corkscrewing down with a decline system. That will save us about $187 million. We've got pluses and we have minuses. I don't know where it's going to turn out. I'm going to know in the next two to three weeks, I can speak to it more. That's a risk that we have to understand. Until we know what that number is, we don't know exactly what the CapEx is going to be. That's why I want to emphasize the Ex-Im loan that they're working on is a 65% debt-to-equity ratio. If the CapEx goes up, we're still talking about more loan from them as well. It's not as negative as what it may seem.
Lastly, just to wrap before we go to the breakout, it sounds like the financing is close to being in place.
Very close.
The offtakes are there. Again, everybody I know always looks at pre-revenue companies and said, "Hey, there's a lot of associated risk." Again, maybe just to wrap up, it sounds like you have most things in hand.
Yeah.
How would you conclude as far as what to look for the investors?
I can just say thank you, because you did a great job, Neil. All the drilling is done. We have proven reserves on this site, so geologically, this is a fabulous resource. All the metallurgy, this is some of the best metallurgical work I've been associated with. I'm very proud of it. We're getting 90+ % recovery of all of our minerals through our metallurgical process. It's taken a long time to figure that out, but we figured it out, and the last part was the hardest. That's how do you separate titanium from niobium. I don't want to bore you with that, but those two elements really like each other, and it's hard to get them to separate. We figured that out, and we're getting greater than 90% recovery of titanium and niobium.
Technically, I couldn't be happier with where we are in terms of de-risking this project. We have all the permits in hand. We have a great social license to operate out there. Not one antagonist, not one protester in the entire community. In fact, over 4,000 of our shareholders are Nebraskan citizens. That's how much they support this project. We really were to the point where we just needed to do project financing. That was something that people questioned, I think last year when we went out and worked hard to raise $500 million, we've taken this Ex-Im process as far as we have, where we're just right on the cusp. People believe financing is going to occur, we're going to be building this project, we can't wait.
Perfect. We'll look forward to all the near-term news, really. Thank you, Mark.
All right. Thank you, Neil.
Appreciate it.
Thank you, everybody.