Okay. We'll start. Marina, let me know when we're ready. As you know, this is an Investor Day, so we have a good part of our audience remotely. But I really wanna thank all of you who are here in person and who made the commitment and the time and the effort to join us. We brought our senior leadership to New York, and we're making them available to you. It's fantastic to be here, and I wanna thank you again. We're very, very, very honored to have you as shareholders. I mean, yesterday, we closed the bell at the United Nations Climate Week here in Nasdaq. We're one of the 10 companies that was invited again to do it. We followed Steve Jobs' widow, who opened Ms.
Powell, who opened the market yesterday, which again, is a testament of all the execution we've been doing around climate goals, around sustainability. And we've done that when it wasn't fashionable, and then it became fashionable, and then we continued to do it because that's part of the DNA of the company. And that has happened regardless of, ensuring that we deliver the returns, the profitability, the cash generation, the low cost, all the metrics, that a publicly traded company would be expected to deliver. So we managed to merge these two elements, which is what makes us so unique. We're celebrating this year, one year as a major, major producer. We created a whole region around us. We've been joined by our neighbors, and we're marking that by shipping 22,000 tons like a clock almost every month.
That's just a short year after turning on our plant. This has never happened in the industry. It's a, it's a record. And unfortunately, that happened against very, very volatile lithium markets, and it's gone unnoticed. But what we wanna highlight today is how much we pushed through, how immaculate was execution throughout the last year, and highlight the record-breaking commissioning that we went through. We accomplished a lot last year, a lot. We ramped up this plant, we perfected the industrial green technology that's now gonna be duplicated, and overall, we also demonstrated how our growth organically is ensured for a few decades. We became the fifth, now, largest industrial producing mineral complex in the world, meaning we're a producing force in the industry.
We're the only non-Australian on that list, which basically ensures our place in the sun as far as geographic diversification for global battery supply chains. The lithium we've been delivering now is enough to build 700,000 cars. When we double, you'll be double that. When we triple, you'll be triple that, which puts us in the axis of building up this globally sustainable, sustainable supply chain, and again, ensures our place amongst all the other players. We've been the only company that has delivered that execution like a trinity: scale, low production costs, and again, traceability, sustainability. When we talk about it, the bar is really low. When we look at the other known low-cost producers today, it's essentially a zero standard. That's another zero.
And so even though the bar has been set really low for low cost, we have managed to set the bar very high and adhere to this low cost. Again, this leadership in the global battery supply chain is absolutely consolidated, and that has nothing to do with geographical boundaries because battery cells cross borders throughout the world. You have cells running in cars here that have been built in Asia, in all of Asia, and that includes China, and we deliver the lithium material for these batteries that circulate here and circulate around the world, where customers do care about what's inside the battery, and again, a testimony to the high standards, we're net zero carbon neutral, which puts us in the axis of this supply chain, and why is that important? Because this is already headed our way.
Even though there's no traceability standards, the supply chain is embracing the same purpose of the electric cars: being zero carbon, zero tailings dams, zero use of drinking water, zero toxic chemicals, zero dirty electricity, zero accidents. And adding zeros makes us bulletproof because mathematics doesn't have an opinion. So this is the climate action answer to the previous, very uncomfortable question around the production ethos of the materials inside the battery of those electric cars. We've all been around what's happened to cobalt. We can't allow this to happen to lithium. So what we're hoping to do is to make obsolete some of those unacceptable shortcuts still undertaken by an industry that sometimes really overlooks these questionable practices to achieve low costs.
You got, as I said, artisanal mining with unethical labor practices, diesel generators being used in ramp-ups, being hailed by the investment community, own coal, thermal plants, again, being hailed by the investor community. We know this is short-lived. You can't build in a multi-decade cycle with these shortcuts. It's going to catch up with the industry, like it did with cobalt and with lots of minerals before it, from tantalum all the way back to diamonds. Again, the zero accidents was important because it was not just not having any fatalities or accidents without injuries for now a year and a quarter. It meant an entire company being geared up to deliver efficiency, and at that, we used the Alcoa case and as an example.
I think lastly, I wanna close that we've done all of that benefiting almost 20% of the economically active population. We have a wide net of direct jobs, indirect jobs, social inclusive, with massive programs around microcredit and irrigation for family farmers. In short, I think we're showing that it's possible to share prosperity and deliver impeccable financial results in a real example that a business with a purpose can bring to society and communities, and that is our operating license right there. In a world of metals and mining, if you don't have that, this is your biggest business risk. Community can close you out like that. And in our case, the community has been embracing us for four years. This is our shield.
So lifting the people of the entire region, enabling the creation of Lithium Valley, which we've done right here in Nasdaq, celebrated a year just now, and uniting state and federal government in a politically polarized country. Essentially, we have managed to launch this crusade in a country that lifted this formerly impoverished region, because now it's growing at 20% a year, into one of the world's foremost lithium-producing regions. So much so that we're now welcoming great metals and mining companies from all over the world into our neighborhood, including a former competitor, cooperator now, which and, you know, it all makes us very proud because we're calling everyone neighbors, and in that neighborhood, we create a strength of a territory. So now where? And that's the purpose of today. I'll close with this: We're gonna double capacity, but that's just the beginning.
Then we're gonna triple capacity, and it's that sense of mission, that ability to unite federal and state governments and access development bank financing in Brazil, which is extremely powerful, is what makes us so relaxed to continue to build with the pace as if the lithium prices were just a side note. Why? This is what we call long-term industrial policy, and we are the absolute leaders in our sector, and that has been proven by the kind of financing we gain access to, especially when you consider the peers in the country that have the same kind of financing. So I'll close by saying we've been humbled by all this execution. Accomplishing this has been really hard. I remember when we first rang the bell at Nasdaq three years ago. We never thought it was gonna be easy, but it's just been brutal.
But we made it, and we made it with a smile, and we made it bringing people along, and we made it creating this unique culture, and we made it sharing prosperity, not just with the neighbors and the other people in the region, in the society, but also sharing prosperity by welcoming other companies, competitors, everyone. Meaning we made it with a sense of abundance, because there's lithium for everyone. Lithium is not rare, but where we are is indeed one of the best territories in the world to deliver on that trinity. In Brazil, you can do this, and that's what we set out to prove. It can be low cost, it can have scale, and it can be sustainable, and it can make everyone extremely, extremely happy at it, all of the stakeholders. So this is stakeholder capitalism at its best. So we know, we know that...
And we've-- it's with a lot of humility that we went through this, and we know that Sigma stands for something much, much bigger than us. Sigma will be our legacy. We're all in a senior leadership over 40, so we've done quite a lot before we got here in different companies, different industries. We are at the peak of our professional performances, and this is what I wanna show today. And we know that Sigma stands for something much, much bigger that's gonna outlast us. So when we look back, we're gonna be remembered for doing this, as we already are in our region and in our country. This is gonna be what we leave in the world.
The purpose, why we're here, why is it that we're doing this, despite all these hardships that we've seen over the last three years, and we know are gonna come our way, and we know we're gonna overcome just the way we've always done, is because we are trying to rewrite tomorrow. We are trying to show that we can fight climate change, we can lift the people, and we can make shareholders and stakeholders extremely, extremely happy. So I wanna thank you again for your support, and with that, I will commence the presentation. So this is kinda how we're gonna run the program today. So I started, Matt's gonna join us soon. We're gonna have the senior leadership here, and we have a lot of members of the senior leadership that, you know, you're welcome to mingle and talk to as well.
So first, we're gonna start with the strategic and commercial update. I'm gonna cover for Catarina's part, which at the moment is headed over to China, where a massive, massive fiscal stimulus was just launched yesterday. Then Rogerio is gonna take the stage to talk about financial flexibility, and our ability to pursue growth. Reinaldo is going to talk about mining. He's our General Manager, Mining. Keith flew from Brazil this morning. He's going to talk about the industrial Greent ech plant. And then Maria José and Fádwa are going to join forces to talk about the ESG update. Reinaldo is going to be joined by Iran Zan, who is gonna talk about how is it possible to grow organically, given the sizable industrial mineral complex we validated this year.
Then we're gonna close with Q&A and remarks, and then we'll serve lunch. Where are we today? These are great pictures. We took this picture exactly at the timestamp of the construction of plant one, two years ago. When you look at it. It was a construction site. When we look at where we are today, we have this beautiful industrial mineral complex, which is the envy of the world. Who's actually joining us? We're welcoming everyone, and this is our plant. No one thought we're gonna make it this fast, this far, this sustainably, this profitably, and stay low cost. Here it is, what we built. It's a beauty. The technology of the plant that we've developed is unique in the world, because we've done all of it Quintuple Zero, and I'll be talking more about it. Here's another picture of the plant.
What's remarkable, there's just not a drop of water here, not a drop, and this is our legacy to the world. Why? Water has been the much talked about issue in the industry. We don't have that issue, but we made a lot of efforts to be able to counter it and deal with it, and this is the site we proudly show you. Not a drop of water, this beautiful industrial complex, so what is it then, that's so special, well, that's what it is. We combine large production scale, the low cost, the highest environmental standards, in what we call the Quintuple Zero lithium, so scale, that matters. You need to be relevant to be able to essentially anchor an entire supply chain around principles, and around quality, and around we call relevance, then production cost. Without low cost, it's all lost.
This is a business after all, and the industry is aiming to deliver electric cars that are at parity with combustion cars. So cost and scale are the basics, and we are delivering on the basics. Any hope that this supply chain would actually be forgiving on high costs or premium pricing, price inefficiencies, just doesn't exist, and we all know that well. Then we have the Quintuple Zero, which is our little miracle, but we pulled it over. And how did we do it? By attributing mathematical measurements and then getting to zero, because, again, zero is unquestionable. It's just not really an opinion. So it is zero carbon, which is something we accomplished a year ahead of time, which puts us in a whole different pedestal, in a week like this, and at events like COP.
I mean, when you think about it, our development bank funding came from the climate fund for an industry that would never be associated with such allocation. But why? We are probably one of the very few, and I mean I can count on one hand, industrial facilities in the country and in the world, that actually is zero carbon today, and again, that's a number. We don't have tailings dams. This is the reason why we all started here, zero tailings dams. We use zero drinking water, so the water we use is actually reused sewage water, zero toxic chemicals, and zero dirty power. So we're gonna talk quite a lot about this, but the combination of these three attributes is what makes us really special. So here it is, scale. Fifth largest mineral industrial lithium complex in the world, top ten global lithium producer.
The scale of the complex is what ensures our ascension to higher ranking in production. It's essentially just unlocking on that organic, mineral reserves that we have there, validated and audited, as Iran will walk us through today. Low production costs, and again, we've shown that in the previous quarter, we're now the third lowest amongst our peers in lithium sourced from rock. Premium lithium. The premium is not green. The premium is because the product, thanks to the Greent ech plant that Keith has been perfecting over the last year, it's essentially a better product, metallurgically. It's particulated, it has efficiencies thrown into the supply chain as what we, it's what we call value in use. So it's bringing savings to customers. So it's a mathematically better product, and we'll talk quite a lot about it today.
The CapEx is fully funded. The development bank rate is 3% in dollars, so we sub treasury, and that allows us to double production. That is part of a wider development banking industrial support, which means we'll keep on going back to it with every phase. This is our cornerstone financing, and it's going to be available for us in every phase, and that is key. It's a key message that I want to deliver today. After ten years, we're being hailed as an industrial leader in our sector in the country, because clearly we're one of the leading players in the world, and that makes the country very proud, especially given the way we've been doing, leaving this social inclusion legacy.
which again, transcends politics, is a national purpose, because how can you not be for lifting one of the country's most impoverished regions, right? Longevity. So we'll talk quite a lot about it. Organically, we got over 25 years of operating life, so all we need to do is just keep on going back to our mineral reserves, and there we are at the scale we're gonna set out to, to achieve today. Excellence. Well, excellence was everything, because again, it's attributing number to operational execution capabilities. Zero accidents, for all of you who run industrial operations, don't happen like that. They are a result of a series of procedures, processes, policies, good management, KPI, that kinda lead to this perfection that it is not to have any incidents, incidents with lost time, not to have any fatalities.
That is an indicator that we chose to demonstrate that we got this. We can actually run this company extremely well, and here is another zero to prove it. Here is one by one, numerically, what we've outlined the previous page. Leading scale, fifth largest industrial mineral complex, so that's the number. Look how far we came, and look how far we climbed. These are the producing complexes. If you notice, Greenbushes, Pilgangoora, Mount Marion and Wodgina are all in Australia. This ensures our geographical diversification. Our place in the industry is secured, if anything, because of geographical diversification. A bit like iron ore. One will not buy all of their iron ore from Australia, so here it is, a very large scale, low cost, reliable producer from Brazil. Here is what that translates into numbers.
In other words, that mineral reserve bench inventory is what allows us to climb into the levels of production we're setting out to achieve here without having to expand inorganically. We just keep adding. We go back to the mineral reserve, and then we add a lithium processing unit, funded mostly by development bank industrial programs. In our case, there's the Climate Fund and there's the Innovation Fund, both funds that we can readily tap into, which means that our position as industrial mineral complex gets matched by our position as a producer. So we ranked all the producers. We haven't classified them into traceable and non-traceable, but quite a few on this ranking are now in the category of non-traceable, particularly because of the low-cost environment, which again, creates enormous differentiation for us.
Because when you clean up the product from traceable to untraceable, we are in a very unique position, and we have a significant competitive advantage in this market, in fact, together with the Australians and the Canadians. And here it is. That's the state of affairs in lithium today. So when you purge from a cost perspective, traceable from untraceable, social, human, labor, and all sorts of, you know, questionable practices out of the supply chain, you're left with very few players. And this is kinda what we call, the black swan of the low cost. All of this material from Africa emerged, and again, for the record, I have an African son. I moved to Africa to have a child. I love Africa.
What we're saying, though, is just like Brazil, just like our region, we can actually lift the bar as opposed to promote a race to the bottom on the back of the low-cost environment there. That's all we're saying. Let's all race to the top as opposed to race to the bottom. And when you look at the high-cost supply, that hasn't been unlocked, even though it has done a fantastic job in adapting itself to environmental practices, because you got this drag coming from untraceable materials at the low end. And this dynamic, it's not for the whole industry. The volumes are not that high, but it is just that gap that prevents the prices from sliding up, and we'll talk quite a lot about it. So we managed to do it. Low-cost production, ethically sourced, without sacrificing sustainability, and that's on the back of the Quintuple Zero.
We don't have tailings dams, no toxic chemicals, no drinking water, no carbon, and no coal power. We've talked about it on and on, especially at Climate Week. We're quite proud of that. So it is possible to do this. This doesn't cost a whole lot of margins. In fact, it's actually a very low cost once we got going and once we deployed the CapEx to do it, which was pre-listing even. We set out the foundation even before we became a public company. So ultimately, our shareholders do have the benefit of all of that foundation, and we just keep on doing it by maintaining the industrial Greent ech technologies that we set out to build. Here it is, then, the fundamental value issue, right?
When we look at prices, it's fascinating because in the beginning of 2021, like, essentially, when you look at the periods of time, we had 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, it's like we're back to the future. We've done all of that. The lithium prices are where they are, but we are back to the same market cap we've had three years ago, which again, it's the demonstration that we did not reprice once we became a leading producer. So that is the conundrum that we're trying to break. That's the correlation we're trying to break. Once we became a producer, we got pegged to other producers, but the other producers weren't developers in twenty twenty-one. We were. So we moved from developer to producer, executed all of it, but we're still exactly where we are back then.
When you think about prices, they haven't really affected us at all, because by not being a producer, we never got the benefit of what's happened to lithium prices in full, like the producers did. This is, again, the correlation we work very hard to break. The fact that we executed against headwinds, and we never repriced in full as a producer. In fact, we never repriced at all 'cause we basically have similar market caps as developers in places like Australia and Canada. Here's a video. That's today. Now, tomorrow. Essentially, where are we headed, right? We're gonna continue to be the leader of sustainable materials. We kept this low cost, so the challenge now is not cost-cutting, it's just to stay exactly where we are. There's more margins to gain solely on scale. Scale is our friend.
And we have one of the most capital-efficient, CapEx-efficient sources of supply in the world. And again, the geographical diversification is our friend. So what are we doing? We're leveraging on all of that and expanding the Greent ech industrial complex to its full potential. We're gonna build one, and then we're gonna build two. So growing profitably, maintaining the financial and capital discipline, maintaining commercial flexibility, maximizing productivity. I mean, we have a series of productivity projects to extract yield from the plant that Keith is going to talk about. The draconian discipline operating costs, which again, allows us to do all of that without weighing heavily on cost, sustainability always, and then strengthening the bench. So this is kind of where we're headed.
We built this foundation for this globally sustainable and traceable supply chain, and that essentially will enable this clean EV battery, which it's not just the Western markets, it's globally produced. Cell batteries are made all over the world, and they circulate all over the world. So for cars of the top five leaders, for top five leaders of battery materials, and that includes leaders from all over Asia, that is the only standard, the clean battery. There's no way out. These procurement units join forces with their OEM customers, and they do focus on the same things we focus on. So we have almost a captive audience there, and that is actually a global audience. And this is where we are headed. That's where we're going. So this is kind of how we're gonna build block by block in a low-risk, low CapEx strategy.
We've managed to achieve one of the most efficient CapEx ratios in the world in terms of CapEx by unit produced, and we're gonna stay exactly that way. Why? Because the bulk of the industrial mineral complex has been built, so our efficiency initiatives will allow us to get to 37,000 tons LCE this year in a pretty streamlined manner, and that's about extracting yield. That's about doing more with the same amount of mineral ore feed that goes into those plants, and that's what Keith is gonna demonstrate here. On phase II, the goal is to basically achieve the same results, initially fed with mine one, then later fed with mine two, so in 2025, we complete construction, so we essentially layer out another industrial arm towards as an expansion of the current Greent ech plant.
Then in 2026 , we'll go at it again. So we build a third line. So sequencing one after the next, same similar development funding, same sources of funding, and essentially supported by the same infrastructure. The infrastructure we have there, the water pipeline, the substation, the wastewater treatment, that infrastructure supports three lines. It's already been built. So it's to leverage on existing infrastructure, drawing from the mineral reserve that we have. And then in 2027 , we embark on becoming the axis of a global chemical-to-chemical supply chain, and that is the simple part of it. We don't have any aspirations to do what we call complex chemicals or specialty chemicals. The whole concept of it is essentially to bank on our own premium product and build lithium sulfate, intermediate chemicals, which is calcination, leaching, which is an acid wash, is simple.
It's intermediate chemicals. Brazil is easy. In Brazil, it's easy to build that, and we layer on the first line of it. Why? Because of all the reasons we discussed, and we will continue to elaborate on throughout this presentation. So this is the picture. Essentially, we're gonna now. We perfected plant one, we embark on another construction, and then we lay out another line train. So line train two, line train one, line train two, line train three, and then we move on to build intermediate chemicals in the port, where it's most logical, given the access to natural gas. So here it is, the industrial mineral complex build-out, drawing from the same mineral reserves that we unlocked this year. It's 100% organic with the longevity of over 20 years. Why chemicals in 2027?
Because this is where supply-demand imbalance turns again in our market. Because of all that's happening today, you have a delay, and we'll talk quite a lot about it, of demand uptake in the West, and then supply-demand imbalance gets created because there's lack of investment in supply, we call traceable supply. So we go back at, again, back to the future in 2027, and this is the consensus. Irrespectively of where prices are headed, what happens in 2027 for sure, in our view, is a clear place in the sun for that intermediate chemicals product. And this is why we chose that year to essentially build it. It's a simple facility. CapEx is, in our view, under $150 million. Again, this is Brazil. We have human capital, we have the knowledge.
It's a calciner, it's a kiln and a leaching and an acid wash. We'll talk quite a lot about it today as well. So this is where we're headed next. We are sitting at the very best place in the supply chain. That is why we're building two more lithium concentrate units. We have a fantastic mineral resource. We're able to build integrating mine and industrial processing facility, the one you saw, with an integrated gross margin of 50%. So that's very unique in today's market. So even a $900 pricing, which is probably the price of this month, in our industry, we are able to deliver these margins. Now, why then go to chemical?
Because it's an extra pickup in margin to achieve if we move there, but only when we have what we call the receivership of it and the sedimentation of our place in the sun, in that market. Before that, we'll continue to do what we're excellent at it, which is lithium concentrate, delivering this premium product using sustainable processing technologies. So again, what is the dichotomy here? Well, it's our own premiumization that we're gonna pick up if we don't achieve that or bankroll that in the market. And if anything, we'll start picking up some of our premiumization. But so this is where we sit, the highest value creation portion of the supply chain. And here is the mathematical demonstration of why are we where we are, and why not now?
Because, again, refining has been a low-margin business, and it has had negative margins. Now, what is important about this slide? Not all lithium players are lithium concentrate producers. So there is a reason why the Australian companies do enjoy more higher valuations, even in this pricing environment. The reason is they sit, like us, at the very best place in the supply chain. I wouldn't wanna be producing chemicals in this industry and competing with this market situation, where the drive of that industry, because it has been conceptually integrated downstream, is to deliver margins as little as possible in China, where 100% of refining is concentrated. Why? Because the drive is to deliver the lowest possible cost battery, and that's a fantastic policy initiative.
But we need to be cognizant of it, meaning that block of the supply chain has a purpose within the wider electric vehicle leadership that the industrial policy there is trying to consolidate, and that is absolutely perfect for those objectives. So trying to have a business whose end meaning is to interfere with it or compete with it in today's environment, in our view, isn't a very sound proposition. And again, this is why we sit in concentrate, hence our comparable are the Australian peers. Hence, this is where the axis of our beliefs in decoupling from some of the U.S.-listed companies is based on. We're not a chemical producer. We're not headed into this fierce competitive situation.
We're sitting, supplying into this, and more importantly, with our place in the sun, supplying into this. Here is why. Because we deliver a better product. It is metallurgically better. So essentially, in an environment of zero or negative margins, which is part of a wider industrial mandate, we actually have our place in the sun, because we allow downstream, enable downstream to have margins by delivering this concentrate at a very little premium, at low to very little premium. Why is that? Because essentially, when you look at our product, we're in a situation where metallurgically, we have a 20%-30% property here that gets passed through the supply chain in the form of higher recoveries and more efficiency. So this is savings to the customer, and this is the math, the math of savings. Hypothetically, we use hypothetical prices to make it easier.
If the chemical was $14,000, the customer would need to buy just seven tons of that chemical, 7.26 tons, to be precise, to produce one ton of high-purity hydroxide. Now, when you look at the product of the competitors, they would need to buy 9 tons-10 tons of the same concentrate to produce the same one ton of the chemical. So one ton of the chemical, that's the cost breakdown of one ton of the chemical. Here it is, the cost breakdown of all the materials that get into that chemical. It's essentially concentrate, but our concentrate, because of its metallurgical properties, delivers that cost saving. And as that, the customer just needs 7.26 tons of that material. And again, these are numbers. These are not opinions. This is a test.
This is tested, this is processed, this is a result. So what does it mean? We're delivering, in a hypothetical scenario, 20%-30%, which could be up to $3,000 of cost savings. So when you think about the bigger picture, then back in an environment where chemicals are in negative margin territory, we're delivering value and use. Our place in the sun here is assured, so we actually are in the best part of the business. We have our place in the sun assured. So we are peers to the Australians, not peers to chemical producers. So when one looks at Sigma, our equity, our stock, our valuation, we're not peers to chemical producers, and that is the decoupling we are basically working so hard to ensure in this industry.
Because being coupled with a chemical producer, especially in the West, where the costs are higher, isn't what we do. What we do is just what the Australians do. We sit in this fantastic spot. We have a premium product. So ultimately, conversion, it's essentially, it's an ecosystem that was built in China. It's gonna be really hard to match that. What we can do, and that again, ties back to when and if we get into that business, we're gonna just we do it just so as to capture this cost advantage, meaning through calcination, which is where it happens because of the particles and through the acid wash. And why, again, in Brazil? Because it is a low-cost environment. We have a chemical industry. The country, never deindustrialized, is a pretty straightforward location to do this.
So this is where we're going in 2027, is essentially becoming the axis of that industry and even supplying to China, too. Why? We will save transport. We will be able to enable the zero carbon refined chemical in China. When you look at the carbon footprint, if you get a best-in-class customer there, it's just 2.5 tons of carbon. It is actually a beautiful integration into the world's largest refinery park from one perspective, and also, clearly, we have our place in the sun in a refining park that's being built throughout the U.S. Currently here, there's a plant here in the U.S. being built. There's a plant of hydroxide that was just built in Germany. There are plants in Japan and Korea that we've visited. So we, again, have our market position ensured here when we build the lithium sulfate plant.
So this is where we're going. And with that vision, we want to build enough firepower to supply lithium concentrate in 2025, 2026, so that when we allocate 20,000 tons LCE for this unit, we are not detracting from our main business, which is to deliver this, this high value creation portion of the supply chain. And then we will capture a bit of this with 20,000 tons LCE in our integrated chemical strategy. So as far as strategy, we wanted to articulate that in detail because the elements that enabled us to deliver on that strategy are already in the industry. Again, we have specialty chemical plants built in Japan, Korea, and Germany today. There's one in construction in the U.S. So the demand for 20,000 tons LCE of traceable zero carbon product is already there, right?
And obviously, to China, we'll deliver a net carbon negative and enable the offsetting of 2.5 tons of carbon, which again, creates a captive market. So when we look at future demand for it, well, it's going further. If you add North America and Europe, and when you think about the plans for the following decade, the conversion capacity will just increase. So again, the foundation for this material is already laid out. So with that, we wrap the strategy section, and we're gonna enter commercial strategy in lithium markets. What do we see going on in the markets today? And as some of you know, like Ares, we have a very hands-on approach to commercial strategy.
We built a real conduit and a real pulse into Asian markets, which allows us to have very good visibility of what is actually happening on the ground. Starting with last night's news, which were phenomenal around the unveiling of a massive stimulus product, the largest since the pandemic, which we believe will provide the fourth quarter with just enough boost on the very end of the supply chain, on the discretionary goods, which are electric vehicles, in order to propel the entire supply chain in the next two quarters. But irrespectively, there's an industrial policy driver in China to essentially decarbonize, and we keep on talking about it. It isn't about climate goals, it's about survival, it's about livability of the large urban centers.
When you take a broader perspective, the entire economic development model of China is about urbanizing people from the rural areas. We've been here before in the United States, in Latin America, in the West. We've done that a few decades ago. Now, that has started in the early 2000s, and it's still halfway through. I mean, China still has 350 million people to urbanize, to continue that economic development model. That is the size of the United States. That is why the red isn't going away, because there's a five-year industrial policy plan that sets the pace of growth, because there's a much bigger goal at stake there, which is to make those A, B, and now C cities livable, to absorb the amount of people equivalent to the whole United States. And how is the easy way to do this?
Decarbonizing mobility. Because mobility is the quick turnaround CapEx, is the three-year churn on CapEx. You change cars every three, max five years, not the grid. The grid takes 10 years. There are investments in the grid, investments in the cars, but the cars are the easy, low-hanging fruit. So this is here to stay, and this is why we have the numbers on the left. In other words, China grew this year, to date, 32%. In the first half alone, essentially, it has grown. So overall, to now, it's grown 32%. So essentially, where are we? We are in a situation where when you look at all these other markets, it essentially shows us that the growth is coming from China.
So when you look at demand increment, what we've got here is just between 2024 and 2025, we're gonna have the demand increment of the equivalent of an entire 2019 and 2020 market. So the increment is just significant. So when you think about 32% growth, basically with the locomotive of China, and zero growth coming from, or very low growth coming from the West, you still have a situation where this year's demand is 1.1 million tons of lithium, and next year's demand will be 1.4 million tons of lithium. So the delta here between this year and next year is equivalent to, you know, more than 200,000 tons. So it's the size of SQM. So one would need an SQM coming out of nowhere between now and next year.
Some of it's coming from untraceable Africa, but there isn't an SQM there in materials. That is just a gap filler. So the foundation of demand growth between this year and next year has to be delivered by what we call the workhorses of the industry. Now, there is supply-demand imbalance, yes, absolutely, and that's what Fastmarkets chart there shows. But the reason why that imbalance gets consumed in 2025 and 2026, and it turns negative into 2027, is that even with the bearish demand forecasts, there isn't really a large, low-cost mine appearing in the horizon. So again, we're back to the future. So when you look at 2027, this is the picture of when the market turns. So if experience is any indicator, if 2027 becomes 2022, we all remember what happened in 2021, which is gonna be 2026.
The strategy is about executing throughout 2025 to be ready in 2026, because this is where we're gonna see what we call the preparation of pricing for imbalance because, again, markets will realize that, well, a large, low-cost, sustainable mine the size of SQM hasn't been built, and by then, we'll have been. We will be needing about two of those, and they aren't here because it isn't fast. That goes back to, again, battery demand. This is the foundation of the demand numbers from the previous slide. And, if you look at even this year, tracking battery demand, you can see the gigawatt capacity increasing. And again, most of it comes from China.
So as we've always said, for those of you who've known us for over five years, we have always built strategy and executed strategy to China because that is the stalwart that is there for the fundamental reasons we've always talked about. If you build capacity, if you plan capacity in tandem with China's industrial policy in five-year plans, in this industry, you're always gonna do well. Again, what's the catch? You've got to be low cost. And here it is, what the changes will bring again into that market that will just be switching into supply-demand imbalance. We have the lithium supply chain, E.U. battery implementation, all these fundamental changes happening in Europe, and which in a way drive the Western markets, because it was the largest growing market outside of China just two years ago.
So you have a changing landscape in a backdrop of, of a market that enters supply-demand imbalance. So this is where we stand to benefit from. We will be the axis delivering to this market those materials. This is European gigawatt capacity installed, throughout. So you can clearly see that, once it picks up in 2025, 2026, you have the support for the lithium supply-demand imbalance. And where are we? What do we do? This is what we're gonna do. So if anything, there's a captive audience, and that's there, right? But this is not all we are. Again, our cornerstone market is the Asian markets, but here's the captive audience, because these cells, these cars, the cells that go into the batteries of these cars are not necessarily produced in Europe. They're produced all over.
But these cells will be adhering to what we call differentiated procurement standards, by definition. So this is our captive audience. So when you look at our supply, we can keep building, and that's not enough of our lithium. And again, sold in Asia, in China, into those end users to supply the cells that go into the batteries that end up in these cars. So this happens irrespectively of where the cells are built. This happens connected to where the cars are sold, and they can be made by any company. It can be made by a Chinese brand, a Western brand, a European brand, an American brand. It's about, well, where cells are made. So these are the challenges of the Western procurement that we talked quite a lot about it.
We met every single one of these challenges, so this is why we're in a league of our own, and even today. And again, why? The low cost became a race to the bottom, and so in the low-cost world, our operation, as you saw, is nothing like this. So again, we are. We stand alone in supplying into the market for the next two years, essentially, where low cost matters. It really matters. These are what we call artisanal mining operations. They feed sometimes industrial plants, sometimes they just deliver small quantities of concentrate. But the main issue here is that they are feeding ore to industrial plants. So when you trace its source, you actually find this as the source of ore, not the beautiful mine, Reinaldo, mechanized, fantastic mine that Reinaldo runs, and this is the problem.
So again, just segueing into the commercial strategy. So what are we doing in the next two years, and today even, to maximize this flexibility and assert value? We have a commercial team that just keeps growing and keeps on getting more capitalized into China, which is the market that matters. Why? Irrespectively to where we sell, to what is our accounts receivable, which in our case is mostly Japanese, European, and Korean, this market, for all the reasons we talk about, it plays out in China, and now in the landscape of the largest chemical exchange, which is the Guangzhou. So between the Guangzhou, the refiners, the boots on the ground, we're able to get a pretty good pulse of what is happening in the industry. So the strategy evolves because, again, the refining happens in China.
We are diversifying between China and ex-China as far as end user and client goes. We're moving from delivering to a trader as a principal to delivering to a trader as an agent, where we jointly develop strategies to commercialize material, which allows us to premiumize the material. We strengthen the relationship with shipping companies so that we now commission our own shipping. That is $20 a ton, which is significant. This consistent ability to ship monthly and regularly within 30-35 days ensures our place in the market, because we are relied upon to deliver that quantity regularly, and we created that strength with customers.
The cheaper financing drives this opportunistic sales approach, meaning we are fully backed up by export financing from some of the largest commercial banks in the country, led by Banco do Brasil at just under 6%. That gives us the breathing room to exercise what we call commercial assertiveness, meaning we actually decide when to sell the product together with our trading company partners, so that we escape the troughs of the cycle, which wasn't something available to us in the previous cycle, but in this cycle it is. And that is key. It's key, because that's an ability our peers in Australia have because of the export credit apparatus in the financial markets in Australia. And now, as we celebrated a year as a producer, we're also able to match.
So when you look at a market like just now in the summer, where it was this dearth of product, and the prices went low to the level of artisanal mining offers, you could clearly see the bifurcation, which players were offering material at which prices. So, area of focus: build out the commercial teams, build a presence on the ground in China, continue to reach further downstream to clients in the battery and car segments of the supply chain, which tend to be less price sensitive, but more importantly, they want reliability of low-cost, traceable supply. Why low cost is important? Because they want to know that as a company, we will be here no matter what happens to prices, given that our cost base is very low.
So we are considered what we call a stalwart, a workhorse of the industry, like our other low-cost peers. And at that, we can explore formal volume commitments to reduce some of that volatility that happens throughout the year with the seasonality of purchasing. There's clear seasonality in the spring and fall. I don't need to get into the details of that with this audience. And so the challenge commercially, and we're meeting it, is to manage our offerings throughout the seasonality through with our commercial trading partners, backed up by export credit, which we've done very successfully this quarter. And as an example, we are today picking up $50 per ton more of pricing, which is a lot in this environment, over had we decided to sell this product in 10th of August.
So by having the ability to hold out literally 40 days, we picked up $50 per ton. If you multiply that by 22, you just think about the magnitude of the swings that happen between in-season and off-season, and a company like Sigma now, joining the Australian concentrate peers, stands to benefit from with that breathing room that having export credit gives us. It is significant. So now, what do we want to achieve with reaching out to battery makers and car makers for three quarters or half of our supply, committing to one year extendable into one-year agreements, which is what we're executing in the fourth quarter? What we're planning to achieve is create that predictability throughout the formal commitments.
We can schedule the shipments into perhaps six shipments a year, save on shipping, deliver to an OEM that wants to ensure they have access to low-cost, traceable material. Again, we're not really getting a premium. We're simply obtaining what we call on-season purchasing cycle market prices, which is what we do today already. But then again, half of our supply will be comfortably delivering into a preordained structure. So that allows us to institutionalize capturing what we're calling premium pricing, but what it really is, is essentially being able to sell throughout the three months of the season. Peak season, spring being March, April, and May. Peak season, fall being now September, October, November. So that's what we wanna do. We wanna structure that and institutionalize that.
And again, we can do that because we've been delivering like a clock every single month, right? And this picture also shows our different strategies as we evolved as a business. In which way? For the first six months of the year, we were hostages of essentially not having export credit available to us. We were just getting started. Export credit is a function of risk management by export banks, which is hinging on performance risk. So when you start, the export banks do not have the history of your performance risk in delivering same amount of product month after month after month. Again, one of the records we broke was to achieve what we call performance risk accomplishment in just six months, because from September to February, we were able to ship at cadence.
That's why we enforce cadence so much, because that cadence was our export credit risk, which is performance risk, given that the security of the export credit bank is the unit. So if you don't deliver the unit, and they, the export credit bank gave you the credit, well, he's at a loss. So reaching that cadence was fundamental to achieve what we call commercial assertiveness and commercial independence. We marked that, meaning evolving from the orange period, with the blue period, essentially like Picasso, right? We did a fixed price sale just to demonstrate that we were conducting price discoveries and we were exercising commercial assertiveness. That's what the major seasoned producers in Australia do. They do price discoveries, they do auctions, and we were able to host our first auction. So that was the fixed sale in March.
Then from there on, we continued to evolve, meaning selling to battery makers like LG, selling to other trading companies like Mitsubishi of Japan. We started to try out various strategies in what we call trader as an agent, either an agent of an end user or an agent of Sigma, but ultimately developing trading strategies together, which is what allowed us today to essentially celebrate the crystallization of $50 over the price of just 40 days ago, which just shows how profound is seasonality in a low-cost market. Again, why also are we able to do this? In addition to cadence, why also are we able to do this? It's quality. Quality is key, right? So the high quality here is visible. So when we see quality, it's there. You don't need to be a chemist to see it.
It's particulated, it's clean, and this is what allows the product to perform better, as we explained earlier. So this quality, chemical quality, is what enables the value in use. So in addition to having eliminated performance risk with a cadence of shipments, we have a better product, metallurgically better. Just the green premium doesn't exist. This is metallurgically better. So on a scale, which is here, in quality alone, we are able to segment our competitive position. And again, the procurement bifurcation is just a bonus because it comes with traceability. So what is the bifurcation? It is what eventually will allow the other element that we deliver, which is traceability, which is essentially the sourcing being responsible, ethically sourcing to be mapped out.
It's interesting because it's already emerged in China, which is the largest market. When you look at Shanghai Metals Market, which is the leading metals information provider, they bifurcate Brazil, Zimbabwe, Australia. They're bifurcating quotes. And what we love about these quotes is that we're able to sell product at a premium to those quotes, which just demonstrates how commercial assertiveness plays out based on quality. Based on quality. So we've been able to capture a premium to what you see there based on the quality, and that comes from all the strategies we outlined: a presence on the ground, a conduit into what happens in the we call tier two, tier three, refining market in China, happening live. And again, why do we believe traceability will become key?
Because the non-traceable product, even though it has a discount here, it drives lithium chemicals where you don't have differentiation. So the price of lithium chemicals end up in the price formulas of just everyone, including Brazil and Australia, so it contaminates the traceable. So traceability, it's not something that one will resolve just quoting this. But again, for us, it doesn't matter. We've been able to sell on our own despite this. But for high-cost producers, it does matter because this makes their operating environment more challenging. So for us, it's essentially being in a privileged position where when we talk about this, and this is why I was essentially anointed to be the spokesperson of the industry about this cause, because it doesn't sound like whining. We can beat this. We're fine. However, anyone else that would do it would sound like whining.
For me, it's more of the same. We got ten years of sustainability, zero carbon. It's just consistent with what we've been always saying. This industry needs to raise standards because the survival of the industry is always at stake. Again, look what happened to cobalt, right? So with that, I will close my portion of the presentation. I'm also gonna welcome Matt DeYoe, our Executive VP, who has been the foundation of putting this presentation together and putting this investor day together. And I'm also gonna welcome Rogerio Marchini, our VP, Executive VP of Corporate Finance. Rogerio joined us a little bit over a month. So Matt and Rogerio will deliver the financial presentation together, and Rogerio is also a bit under the weather today. He got very cold. He had fever.
So in classic Sigma mode, he's just, you know, weathered it and came here. So with that, I'll welcome the two of you.
Oh, Rogerio, you can go up. We were gonna have a short break. We kind of moved through it a little bit. Maybe we can, after our section, we pause for a few minutes and let people kind of use the facilities if they want. But, again, Rogerio, welcome. He's only been here for a month, so I figured I'd help him out on stage a little bit, and so-
So thank you. Sorry for my performance today because I have an American cold. So we bring here our the key financial priorities. I'm here to add my experience, a fantastic team, Filipe, Caio and Bruno, that do an amazing job. So this year, we will focus in disbursing the BNDES. It's an amazing line that we received just a month ago. Try to get phase III finance with BNDES together at the same time, try to get a FINEP facility two. And we are talking with Asian banks to improve our credit and trade finance facilities.
With the product cadence nowadays, we are in a position where the banks and the financial markets are believing in us, so it's much easier to talk with them, and they believe that now that we are producing 2,000 every month. We can pay the indebtedness, so we are generating cash, so-
Together with this, we are preparing a huge liability management, where we will take short and middle terms in a long-term facility. Of course, because we don't control the price of lithium, we need to control the cost of producing lithium. Talking about BNDES facility, it's a long-term facility with an 18-month grace period. It's amazing because we can finish the plant before we start the payments of amortization. It gives the company time to build before start the payments. The facility is a government incentive rate. The price is below Brazilian treasury. It's really cheap. If we consider the swap price today, it's something around $2.5.
So it's cheap in dollar too, and it's a reimbursement indebtedness. What it means? That I need to expend the money and send to the BNDES, conclude the spend, and they reimburse the company. But we can ask them to advance some money, and after that, we can control the expend.
I think the point as well on BNDES, right, as you mentioned earlier, is an opportunity to build a longer-term relationship with the development banks in Brazil. Tailings upcycling facilities, where we can talk more about potential phase III lithium intermediates, the BNDES kind of expressed a desire to partner with a lot of this initiatives over time. So this isn't necessarily a one-and-done commitment from them, it's an ability to grow with them. And I'll kinda just take this slide a bit, although Rogerio was finance director at Embraer, and Embraer being one of the many companies in Brazil to actually benefit from BNDES debt over time. Look, the leaders of Brazilian industry have all kind of grown on the back of a lot of this inexpensive BNDES financing. We're happy to join the ranks of them.
It's, as Rogerio said, heavily subsidized sub-Treasury debt, and because of the lasting partnership, it's something we can kind of tap continually, which gives us more confidence as well in our own growth profile. Ana obviously spoke a lot about our ability to operate the plant, shipping 22,000 tons a month. I think we have the confidence in our team in place to grow, and now we have the financial engine behind that to really, one, provide the capital, but two, lower our cost of capital, considerably. So I don't know if you wanna talk about the disbursement cycle, but-
No, this is a hypothetical CapEx expansion. What we try to show here is that the BNDES line doesn't need working capital lines. They will give all the money that we need to build the plant. Even if it's a reimbursement type, we don't need a lot of working capital. But we still can ask BNDES to advance some money, and it's better than this.
Yeah, I think Rogerio's point is, this is kind of a little bit of a worst-case scenario, but the point being, even though it's a reimbursement program, there are banks and facilities within BNDES that can actually advance us some of the money to even front the initial distribution and disbursement. But the point being, you know, the actual capital outlay from a total dollar spend is somewhat minimal, given the disbursement schedule, and then the first disbursement in general being a catch-up, such that we can actually claim back to... Rogerio, I don't know, you know, what's, how much time do we have to go back to for the catch-up distribution?
One month.
Yeah. So we can back spend or you know recover some of the capital already spent. This is kind of just our net cash position as of the end of the quarter, and we wanted to update people a little bit on this. One thing that we had talked about at the end of the quarter and upon BNDES approval was a reduction in our trade line balance. The $100 million in cash on the balance sheet was great. It provided the support to kinda move forward with phase II, but we've always said it's not an ideal way to backstop a build. With BNDES support coming in behind that, we don't have to carry that same load of trade lines.
You know, we've said, and Ana has mentioned, we can see on the next slides, the interest rate on the trade lines has fallen considerably, which is obviously a tailwind to us, but it's still an interest burden we don't wanna carry at this point in the cycle. So we've taken down our actual trade line balances, you know, since we reported 3Q earnings, but net cash has, in excess of the trade lines, has improved over that time. So cash in excess of trade lines is up, overall cash is down. That's just a function of reimbursing some of these trade lines we don't really need anymore.
I mean, like, Rogerio has a lot of experience in export financing and things like that, but I'll let you expand a little bit on just the elaboration and the collaboration with Banco do Brasil, some of the Asian balance sheets. But this is just an articulation of how the profile of some of the short-term debt has improved since we showed the cadence and since we kind of came up and put product to market every month. So I, you know, I'll-
I am a very lucky guy, you know. The hard job was made, so now is just to talk with the banks, then show the cadence and ask if cheaper money. You know, it's easy now.
Yeah, and I think that's one of the, the nice things is, you can kind of, lower rates beget lower rates in some extent. So some of the negotiations, we can go back to the table and, and that becomes a circular reference for other discussions. On the right is just kind of the debt profile of available liquidity for us. We've got the current long-term debt, which we've talked about, liability management. We're kind of working on repaying that and also improving some short-term liquidity. But then again, I mean, trade lines and export credit lines are all very, attractive to us at this point. I'm gonna take over a little bit to talk more on costs.
Rogerio, again, has only been here for a couple of weeks, but part of the financial team's responsibilities are monitoring costs on a pretty active basis. Monthly reports, subsector builds, trying to kind of provide the insight to the management team, obviously, on where our expenses are coming in. We've taken a pretty draconian view on costs, and a lot of that detailed financial reporting has come in handy as to trying to figure out where we can cut back. We've talked about this on the 3Q call, or sorry, the 2Q earnings call. We kind of have come in ahead of our targets, or I should say, we hit our targets a quarter ahead. Cash costs across the board, SG&A, all down about 20%-24% since we put out the guidance in 4Q.
I remember sitting in a lot of those rooms. There was a lot of skepticism that we could do it, but this, I mean, the good thing about this as well is, we know production on the first half of the year wasn't as strong as we would have wanted. So, we think there's some leverage to keep this cost profile low. And as we've said, scale is our friend, particularly, as it relates to doubling capacity. This is kind of just a walkthrough on how we stand to benefit from scale. We've talked, and Ana had said, "You know, don't expect much in the way of on-site savings." We're building a new mine over time. We're building a new plant over time. This is duplicative costs.
You know, we don't need necessarily a new Keith or a new Reinaldo, but we need a lot of the additional support beneath that. Mining costs, we've said, most variable cost-centric business, but here we gain leverage through non-contracted labor, some of the services and ancillary costs. Reinaldo will also talk about this, but we're exploring initiatives to bring down mining costs site-wide. Larger trucks for waste hauling, fine-tuning blasting practices. Some of our contracts come up annually. Perhaps there's volume discounts we can attain. Processing costs, this is the fixed cost side of the business. It's pretty much gonna be a doubling of our cost base as we build the second plant. There's gonna be minimal savings here as much as the costs will be duplicative outside of the senior leadership. But there is some fixed overhead on site. What is that?
IT, HR, water, sanitation, geology. A lot of these costs don't need to double. Loosely, we've been talking about, you know, $30 a ton of our cost structure, that we could see maybe 30% more of savings on as we double the plant. Not monumental, but as Ana said, "Don't expect a lot of the leverage to come from on-site." But we do think we have some in the bag. We're just not guiding to it per se, just... We wanna see this come through a bit more. That said, SG&A expense is where we're gonna see a significant leverage, right? We'll add more headcount, you know, employees. Catarina, who runs Commercial Ops, will be adding people in China and some of these other, you know, regions to help build out our strategies. But we don't need to double our SG&A.
The SG&A is already basically supporting a bigger franchise in itself, so maybe not full cut in half, but close for our SG&A on a unitary basis, and then interest expense. You know, dollar interest, we're working to move lower as we take our trade lines off, but on a net basis, we'll also be incurring BNDES debt, but as we move our interest rate lower and double capacity, our unitary costs for interest are gonna drop considerably, so what does that look like? I mean, it's a little hard to see, and I apologize. We'll get the slides out, but you can kinda get the high end of it. This isn't really meant to be an explicit guidance, though it kind of shows up as that. Headline price on a 6% basis is just the sell side average, right?
And if you were to leverage the phase build-out, as Ana has kind of suggested, and what the capacity could look like based on revenues, our CIF costs, and again, we're not even leveraging that lower. Transportation, which we didn't talk on the other slide, another area where we think we can gain savings based on renting Supramaxes versus holds of partial hulls. Like, we hope that this is maybe a little bit conservative as it relates to our ability to squeeze more out. Interest is gonna be a little bit unknown here because we have a few different levers we can pull, but this kinda gives us an idea of where EBITDA could be on a per ton basis, just given you know what the franchise could look like based on the prevailing price estimates.
Obviously, one thing we do know is price forecasts are going to be wrong. That's for sure, they always are. So, take it with a grain of salt, but this kind of just to provide additional leverage or different viewpoint as to the earnings potential of the company and the cash flow potential as we scale. And look, this is a little bit of a summary of what you've heard for the most part. We don't really need to hash over this, but again, cash flow building, building liquidity, cash flow generation with higher scale, you know, greater than 50% cash margins as we move through the cycle. Development bank financing, as Rogerio had mentioned, for the phase II expansion, we have 99% of our budget already covered.
Just a correction here.
Yeah.
The correct number is 7.53 .
Ah, yes! Good call. 7.53 .
Just a small-
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Well, I should have had you earlier on this. Then, obviously, we talked about the diversified commercial partnerships to help fund working capital. The Asian balance sheets, trading companies, and then kind of the existing relationships with some of the banks in Brazil, whether it's Santander or XP. We're going to take a quick little break. I don't know, Rogerio, if you have any closing comments.
Thank you very much.
No, I know it's-
I'd like to thank you because I'm a little, you know, slow today, and you help a lot.
I wasn't going to leave you high and dry.
Thank you.
But we're going to take a little break, and then we'll move to mining with Reinaldo. So maybe give it, like, five minutes, and we can pick it back up.
... So, I think we're gonna get started again, if everybody kinda comes back and takes a seat. Hold on. Oh, yeah, I know.
So I think we should start.
Yeah.
Ready?
So, I don't think I have sound. Do I have sound? Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I have sound, right? So yeah, I have sound. I got sound. So I'm here to introduce Reinaldo, who is the General Manager for Mining. So he will be delivering on our mining strategy, and then he'll be followed-
Sorry.
-by Iran, who jointly with Reinaldo, will deliver on how we're gonna expand organically our mining strategy. I'll basically sit here as an audience and support for any, you know, interactions that we're gonna have throughout the presentation, like Matt did with Rogerio. But essentially, Reinaldo, this is our show. Reinaldo's been with us since the very beginning. He pre-stripped our mine in 2022, so he knows our operations inside out.
Y-
And he's been growing that team, along with the phenomenal job we've had today, which has managed the two-pit structure into phase I. Now moving on to plan as we grow into mines two and mine three, which again are not necessarily connected to industrial capacity, which is what Reinaldo is going to show, that we have quite a lot of flexibility in our assets. Reinaldo.
Okay, thank you. Thank you, Ana.
Yeah.
So, as Ana said, I'm responsible for the mine operation, and I believe that if we have a key word for the mine operation right now, is to sustain the stability of the DMS process. So we want to keep the grade and all the variables that may impact the DMS process stable. This is a picture of the mine, and we are located in a region having two pits that are split by this creek, the Piauí Creek, that I mean, the community around takes use of this water. So initially, I think it's important to highlight the you know, the environment and social commitment of the operation.
It's important to say that, in terms of develop the sustainability of the system, including mine, crush, and DMS, and shipment, we are taking, you know, advantage of the knowledge of the ore, or the different types of ore, so we can, you know. Additionally to the quality, the grade of lithium oxide, we know exactly what variables will be impact the DMS, so we can blend it to avoid the fluctuations and to guarantee the sustainability and competitiveness of the operation. Inside this system, I believe that is was to mention the importance of the blasting.
Blasting is an operation that you know guarantees the fragmentation of the rock, and it is related to the liberation of the ore, is related to the contamination and loss of the ore, and we're doing that in a you know excellent level. Developing the best practice in blasting guarantees that we have a optimal cost, because this impacts the productivity of the equipment, and especially we want to avoid over-fragmentation, generating fines that may not be recovered through the DMS, so inside the mine operation, blasting is a critical activity, and we are doing that, I mean, in a excellent level.
In terms of remaining a low-cost production, this is, I mean, essential for the competitiveness and the sustainability of our operation. And one of the key factors in terms of our low cost is using right now 40-ton trucks. 40-ton trucks, normally road trucks, that's different from what the Australian our peers they propose. There they use off-road trucks. But the main aspect of using this, I mean, those small equipment, is that we have local suppliers. This equipment is in terms of diesel consumption very efficient. And we have the availability of a local workforce, so it's a gain-gain.
We use the small trucks, we get the community involved in the operation, and we are competitive in terms of diesel and cost. Okay, so we took this opportunity during the H1 this year to widen the Xuxa pit. This give us the opportunity of sustaining the feeding of the next phase with ore from Xuxa, which is ore that we know very well, and this give us the you know, redundancy in terms of waiting for the Barreiro pit to be licensed and opened. The license is expect to the next month, it's not something. I mean, the process is being developed.
But, having the capacity of feeding the two plants with the ore from Xuxa, give us this smooth transition between what we know and what's to be developed. So, in terms of intermediate stripping, we opened the pit, liberating the ore, giving us capacity of going to the next step to the next phase with, you know, security.
That's, again, not a small undertaking, right? Because it gives us the certainty of the geometallurgy during the commissioning of the next production line.
Yes.
Which again, delivering, the material with the consistency that we've been delivering, is a result of several variables that need to come together, and geometallurgy being a key variable.
Mm-hmm.
Xuxa being high purity, you know, slightly straightforward to purify, to remove contaminants, and being the known mineralogy, geometallurgy, makes it a lot easier for us to carry through feeding a dual operation-
Mm-hmm
... with the mine one, throughout the first two years of commissioning that plant. So we're gonna sail through, 2025, 2026, and early 2027, which are the periods when the lithium markets will be kind of flattish, with this ultra-high quality, known material, that gives us, again, the certainty of performance, when it comes to the expansion. And that's essentially why Reinaldo, Keith, and I, earned and took the strategy of what's on the next page, which is widening phase I pit, preparing the geometry, the pit shell design, for that, execution next year.
To give us the capacity of feeding the two plants with the ore that we know very well, we know the DNA. And, as you mentioned, Ana, we are moving from, you know, supporting the mining plan based on grade, to, all the variables that impact the whole process. We want to know, how the ore behaves in the drill blasting, load haul, homogenization, on the stockyard that feeds the crush, how it behaves on the crushing and DMS itself. So, we are moving from grade control to, geometallurgical modeling and planning. And this graph shows the proposal of the intermediate stripping.
So in the month of July, we increased the stripping rate to 37, exactly to open the pit, giving us these capacities. So for the next year, we have enough capacity in terms of a liberated ore to feed those two plants. And-
And we're back to mine plan, right? So it's essentially-
Mm
... an exercise of intermediate stripping that we took swiftly-
Mm-hmm
... to make it clear that it was a one-off CapEx, and then we're back to the overall strip ratio.
That's something that we want to sustain for the life of the mine. Having more than one pit feeding the plants that are available give us this redundancy or flexibility. If anything is required in terms of mine development, for example, and you need to, for some reason, install, for example, an access to, you know, to guarantee the development of the mine, you have another pits to, you know, as a redundancy, guarantee the continuity of the operation. It's something that we are discussing right now and give us the sense of competitiveness and sustainability for the future. Okay, I started here.
We have two pits on the Xuxa body, and they are split by this Ribeirão Creek, which is a river, a creek that the community uses for, I mean, throughout the year. The two pits are similar in terms of ore quality. Actually, there is some difference in terms of mineralogy, but they are planned to support the life of mine together, and that's what we're doing right now.
And again, this is a reminder of why is it 13 to one to begin with, and not five, given that the mine has been open for going into the third year, is because of this. We made that commitment, and this, again, it is, it's everything, because this is our operational license right there. This is the reason why the community embraces us. And again, 13 to one, given that we got plenty of cushion throughout the industrial operation, is something we can perfectly live with.
Mm-hmm, and this 13 to one is being discussed in terms of geometallurgy as well.
Right.
'Cause part of the ore that we have available there was not initially considered in the mine plan. So as we develop the knowledge of the ore, we can recover more of this ore, decreasing the stripping rate and, I mean, impacting dramatically the cost of operation. And this is the type of, you know, effort that we are doing together to increase the competitiveness and sustainability of this project. Mm-hmm. This is a view of the pit, I mean, during the operation. We have the drills, we have excavator trucks. Those are the 40-ton trucks. The ore body can be seen here as this white strip going to, I mean, in a dip of 45 degrees.
You can tell the ore body from the host rock, which is the schist. In terms of you know, decreasing the cost in the long term, we are proposing to move from those 40-ton trucks to 70-ton trucks, keeping the same widths of the roads, 'cause the width of the road impact the stripping rate. The larger the truck, the more waste you need to remove to install the roads. And additionally to this change, we are discussing the possibility, actually is in the plan for the next year, bringing hybrid trucks that is moving based on diesel and electricity, and that impacts the cost as well. So, we are keeping the stripping rate as low as possible.
We are using the most effective equipment to run the mine, and we are increasing the recovery of the ore, so that give us the certainty that we are in the right direction in terms of, you know, being successful with this project. I mean, in terms of the long term and the short-term geological model - 'cause you have the long-term geological model based on a drill grid of 50/ 50, and to model, to refine the information, we close it to 10/ 10.
That gives us more detailed information on the types of ore and the quality, and the stability that's necessary to keep the productivity and effectiveness of the DMS, guaranteeing the supply of ore to be shipped. Bringing from the long term to the short term geological model, we are understanding better what types of ore we have, and based on that information, we are, you know, developing the mine plan, trying to avoid fluctuations and guarantee the maximum stability for the DMS process, and so the maximum productivity and cost as well. This is the plan for the future. As I mentioned, we have the permit for Barreiro on the end of next month. We'll begin, but we want to evaluate alternative scenarios.
And for that, we have, as I mentioned, the intermediate stripping of Xuxa that give us the capacity of supplying the ore for running the two plants. But as we have, you know, difference in terms of the KPIs that sustain the life of mine planning, we can decide of going with Xuxa for a certain period, Barreiro, or a blend of those two. 'Cause Barreiro has a high grade, a lower stripping rate, too, but Xuxa has the knowledge of the ore and a shortened hauling distance. So this is to be discussed, but we are sure that the best option will be in place for us to start running the next phase. And I think that's it.
That's just operational optimization, because again, mining is our larger cost. So when we think about the overall plant gate costs that we have today of around $370 per tonne, mining is over 2/3 of that. So every initiative. Why did we give you quite an operational update in mining? Is 'cause, again, Reinaldo wanted to be granular so that every initiative in mining matters a lot for our resilience as a company in the next two years, where you... in an environment where low cost has low cost is king-
Mm-hmm
... given that the prices will be flattish and won't move that much. So we'll sail through the next two years on the back of those initiatives, which again, it's understanding how granular we go in our obsession with low cost. And then with that-
Mm-hmm.
Do you wanna talk a bit more about mine planning and blasting, what is it that we've been doing?
Yeah
... to the level of being granular, right?
Exactly. I think I mentioned that, but I mean, I think it's important to, you know, to repeat it because blasting is a very important activity through the mining operations. It guarantees the productivity of the equipment, it guarantees the recovery and loss. I mean, impacts the loss of ore that we want to avoid, and give us the productivity necessary for decreasing the cost. So if you are not, I mean, if you do not achieve the optimal fragmentation, then the excavators, for example, will lose in terms of productivity.
Mm.
So we want to find the sweet spot between cost in terms of explosives and cost in terms of operation. And again, we want to avoid the fines generation that guarantees the maximum recovery through the DMS process. So we are, I mean, doing our best effort in terms of having a optimal blasting strategies and operation. On the other side, I think I just mentioned the use of, you know, bigger trucks, 70-ton trucks that guarantees the same geometry, no impact in the stripping rate, which is, I mean, another key variable in terms of the plant cost. And based on those initiatives, we are on the way of guaranteeing the success of this project, I would say. Mm-hmm.
So now, Reinaldo will be joined by Iran, because we're going to highlight how we can expand organically based on the known geology that we've got. So Reinaldo, take a seat. So Iran will take the podium.
Hey, guys.
Yeah. So you got the mic, right?
Oh.
In here. Yes, there you go. You got it. Yeah.
So-
Have a-
Good morning, everyone.
Say-
Well-
Thanks, Ana, for this opportunity again, to talk about the Sigma geology and the Sigma exploration works. I'm here to explain for everyone how we'll be able to keep growing constant our resource during this year and in next years, in the next months. Because we got to start going to the south of the project or middle center of the Grota do Cirilo area in the next few months. Call it Mining 2, and the name is that we know, it's called Barreiro. We gotta start to grow organically. We keep constants to bring in new resources during
Just, just a sec.
Engineers are aware of it? We make another announcement when everything is clear out.
Okay, there's a fire.
Sorry for giving it the-
That's okay.
There's a fire alarm. It's none of our concern as of this moment. There will be an announcement for you to evacuate.
Perfect. Thank you.
That's great.
Yeah. Thank you. Okay, so what should we do? Should we continue?
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
All right, so...
Sorry, guys. Keep continuing. Here I will present to you. Sigma will grow organically. Well, what I mean is, we got to keep constant to bring more resources and we're-
May I have your attention, please? May I have your attention, please? This is advise by the architecture director. We have a second alarm on the eleventh floor. There's a person investigating the cause of the alarm. Okay, stand by.
Okay, maybe we can take a short break.
Yeah, maybe-
Let's take a short break.
Maybe take a good idea.
Let's take a short break. Yes.
Cool.
Okay.
Hello? Yeah. So just to update the webcast, the fire alarm's going off in the Nasdaq building. We're waiting for more clarity from the building team. We'll get back underway shortly. I'm sure it's nothing, but that's why we're taking a quick break. Thank you. Still not sure why the fire alarm's going off, but I don't think there appears to be a problem. We're gonna get back going right now. Maybe another announcement, so we apologize if there's another interruption, but I think we are probably gonna battle through that and the best chance of keeping this on time. Iran, Reinaldo, Ana, you can kick back off on the mining side.
Yeah. So they cleared us to proceed, saying that there's no reason for concern with the alarm. So with that, we'll go into expansions.
Excellent.
Iran is going to highlight the integration between the work he's done in 2023 and now in 2024 on geology, how that translates into drawing from those mineral reserves, 77 million tons of it.
Million tons, yeah.
That's a lot of lithium -
There it is.
to build up seamlessly all the mines we will be opening throughout to reach the 125,000-ton LCE objective we set out for the end of 2027 organically. Which is basically validated and demonstrated by all the great work that geology did, and now integrated into mining through geometallurgy, and we have a representative of the geometallurgy department here, Banco.... so with you.
Okay, so here it's important to say that it's our work now of the long term. It's support the mining team, Reinaldo team, to expansion in terms of ore inside of the mines. So like I spoke about it, we are coming to open mine two in the next few months ago. So now we are significantly large ore bodies than mine one. What it's mean is because when you move to the south part of the project, existing there are many, a bunch of dikes in that region. So when you compare in terms of tons, so that part, specifically in that part, we have million tons of pegmatites in there.
It means, of course, that we know that this ore existing there. And now, when you comes to the initiation of the mine, we need to combine that information, and through with the mining teams, with the Reinaldo, the maximum information of these mines. Exist many pegmatites in parallel in these structures in there, so that has a good opportunity to grow the knowledge about this pegmatite in there and bring and creating extension of these bodies, especially in the Mining 2 , with a large pit. When you goes to the large structural mining in there, we can creating totally 45 million tons in that specifically part in the Mining 2, called Barreiro.
That's so important when you comes through these numbers, specifically when you have a team that have great capacity to dig out this material with the sustainability and responsible in terms of a technical team, and Sigma has this team in there. Mining 2, it's mean phase II and phase III, and we come through this information and to support the Reinaldo in terms of how to manage it. This material comes through the production in a team of Keith.
So, when you works with separate pits, for example, comes through the material in the first pit, and when they finalize the ore in that pit, comes through the second pit, and you can combine this material. When you depleting one of those pits, you can receive material for the others. So, in 2026, we has a focus in creating an extension to the Mining 2 with a large pit, like I said, and it totally up to the 4.5 million tons in there. So of course, then we have another objective. One of those objectives is in 2029.
When you have the Mining One's deplete, you can develop it Mining 3 with geology, with the Mining 4 in the large pit, approximately, totally, we expect to comes through very close to 60 million tons. That's our focus in the next days.
That goes back to the bigger picture. What's the bigger picture? We always have two areas, and there's a decoupling between industrial and mining. Which way? We just outlined before in Reinaldo's presentation, we have mine one, which will feed two industrial lines, and then that goes all the way through 2026 to 2027. As Reinaldo was outlining, in 2026, we then open mine two, and then we'll run with those. That's why, because those are the known geometallurgy. We will have certainty of performance, as we launch the new each new mine, and we'll run that way. When mine one depletes, because that's got the shortest mine life, is eight to nine years, then we will open up, we move on to open mine three and four, which are an integrated mine.
That's kind of what we're gonna outline here, meaning mines are not connected to industrial plants. In fact, running with a mine for longer in an industrial facility is actually what we want because it's the known geometallurgy. We'll have perfected the processes, perfected the technological flow sheet for the geometallurgy. And again, what Reinaldo will show you is on the back of the work, the great work his team has done. We actually have these organic mineral reserves identified and ready to be drawn from as we grow. And Reinaldo, which will be managing all these mines, will talk a bit more about why we chose that strategy to go about our development. It's less impact. It's, you know, seamless, less risk, straightforward. Again, simplicity. The elegance is in the simplicity of our strategy.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, when you take into perspective, the level of maturity of each one of the pits, this is something that we can improve when we have a multi-pit mine planning. 'Cause, you may, you know, split the life of the pit in three phase.
... The initial phase when you have, I mean, a lower stripping ratio, the, you know, the medium term, when you have the highest stripping ratio, and the final phase of the pit, when you have a lower stripping rate, but a lower productivity. So if you have the chance of compensating the loss of productivity of the end of the life, that pit with a new one, it gives us stability necessary to keep the production flowing steadily. And I mean, in terms of, you know, stability of the quality as well, it's something that you can plan on the long term, as you have lower grades during some phase of the mine, especially during the beginning of the operation.
Because the upper part of the reserve, you have this process that we call weathering. The rain, I mean, through the geological years, the rain washes the lithium, and then you have a concentration of a harder rock, a fresher rock, with a higher content of Li. So you can manage those fluctuations to avoid that the DMS feel it. So in the end of the day, you have a stability, you have a productivity, and lower cost. So, we do believe that, having this multi-pit mine plan will, you know, sustain us in terms of the long term.
Oh, that's our signal. There's an announcement for the webcast on the fire alarm.
So our condition on the third floor has been found to be false alarm. I repeat, the alarm on the third floor has been found to be a false alarm. Everything clear. Thank you.
So we got full clearance to proceed, and that's a good thing.
Okay.
because it's a good omen to proceed with our organic growth and expansions.
Yeah.
So on the next page, we will now illustrate-
Yeah
how that plays out throughout. First, the next one, which is mine two, and then at the bottom picture, you see the swarm, and then what it then will show is that mine two actually grows northwest. And based on the work that we've done, is we used to be called phase V, and we got this whole target area, which allows this mine to grow northwest.
Yeah, exactly. So it's all this conception, it's being real. It's because we have a bunch of pegmatites in that area. So that's the important information. So you can see in that figure here below, it's multiple dikes in parallel. It's called the swarm dikes in parallel. So, in that, we did some holes in that area, that we support that theory that we can expand for the north facing of the pit, the Barreiro, and we increase that phase II, that Mining 2, and a big pit, that we can provide more material to support that mining team and the process team.
That's Xuxa extension. It means the our drill target that we can provide more material, and of course, Reinaldo and the team can expand the wall of the pit in that direction. And then not that, so that direction, in other directions, that we can provide more information in terms of pegmatites in that region. Here, it's some highlights of our drill campaign, and that finalize in the initial of the year. We intercept good grades like 1.7 , 1.8 , 1.50 , 1.49 , 1.8 . It's a region that has quite good material, that we can give an input inside of the DMS and produce good quality of concentration during our long life of mine.
The next one, it's the next phases or next mine, called Mining 3 and Mining 4, is the same structure, the same type of pegmatite, the same mineralogy, the same grades when you saw the block models. Guys, we talk about 3.2 km. It's huge pegmatites.
Yeah.
So when you come through the Xuxa, for example, that we discover it, a small pegmatites cross the rivers. It's 400 m the initial, and it finalize exploration in 1.4 km, 1.7 km now. So here, it's a double of it. It's a huge pegmatite that we can-
And wide.
And wide.
Exactly.
Exactly. So and see, in between this structure, there exists a region that we can provide more information. That's a really good region to keep to make exploration program. And for the mining team, it's easy to manage that pit to support the feed and the production inside of our DMS. Mining 3 and Mining 4 combined mine development of approximately 60 million tons, so it's a huge number of material. And let me say and repeat again, it's because happen multiple pegmatites in parallel structure, that we can provide more and more information, and it bring to the mining team that information to clearly, and the grades are the same and consistent, and the team are resilient to understand better and better and better in this region.
Those information, it's exactly the next, the last, the latest slide that I did, but it's the numbers is important. It's 3.2 km long by 1.3 km wide, and the true thickness range, it's between five and 50 m. It's a huge number. It's like averaging here, it's like 20 m, 25 m of an average wide, and provides 60 million tons of combined resource at the same grade, consistent, and the resilient grade, 1.3%-1.4% Li2O. It's great for the production, great for the Keith, Keith team to receive material between 1.3%-1.4%. It means that we will get, of course, definitely up to 6% of concentrate at the end of the line of the DMS.
The Murial, it's a phase V or Mining 4, call it here. So Murial, it's a pegmatite, beautiful pegmatite. It's provide us 16.1 million tons at 1.2% lithium oxide. So again, we need to keep in our mind that we are in the middle, in the center of our claims, and the principal part of the project that exists, a bunch of pegmatites in there, provide resource and reserves are there. You just can combine and share this information with the mining team and consistent team inside of the DMS production team, that we are ready to get this material for the DMS process and provide a comfortable position to longevity production at Sigma during up to 25 years.
That's great, because essentially, in the next slide, what we're showing here is, again, just these are all of our pits. There's a 40-45 million ton pit between phase II, which is in itself 30-ish, plus its extension, which adds between 50 million tons. Again, classic extension, so a very wide, favorable, you know, area in phase II. And then you have this other 60 million ton combining phase III and phase IV. So pretty straightforward organic expansions, which again, just demonstrate how large this company is, the scale of the mineral reserve that kind of backs up. And then as we've shown, numbers that are around the mineral resource. So 77 million tons of reserve, and now you see where it is. That's why we get so relaxed about laying out 125,000 tons LCE in 2027.
There's plenty of lithium here to draw from.
Yeah.
Again, the most important thing, it's consistent material, grade and concentration resilience throughout, and that's what these charts illustrate, right, Iran?
Yeah, yeah. And, and see, the material that we support for the, for the production, and the-- and Reinaldo works with that directly, it's a good geometallurgy material. So in terms of our size of the crystals inside grades and the percentage of these crystals in material of the rock, so say, such as the percentage of the spodumene in that rock, it's so huge. It's up to the-- in some parts, up to the 75% of spodumene in a matrix of rock. So that information comes through the how Sigma can be constant and create a resilience of this material. So here, it's some points that validates Sigma's claims of the consistent grades and the coarse of the spodumene crystals quality throughout resource section.
Exactly, what I'm said here in this presentation. So at zero cutoff grades, the cumulative resource is total, it's 110 million tons up to 1.3% of Li2O. At the high-grade cutoff grade, it's 1% in cumulative resource, totally 92 million tons up to 1.5% of Li2O. So in this graph, we can show exactly our consistency. So in different cutoffs, we can maintain 110 million tons during a long space when you can compare cutoff grades. For example, 0.5% in terms of a material.
What I'm saying is, again, so longevity and consistent material that we can put in front of our ROM pad for Keith to work with then through the DMS plant. So below, it's our consistent grade that you can see. It's keeping 1.5%, and in the middle, it's averaging with 1.37% in terms of a grade. So it's five different resources here in front of you, so that we can support constant to our production during our longevity.
Thanks. Thanks, Zan, and thanks, Sigma-
Thank you
... for our opportunity to talk with you again.
...So the next one, without further ado, we're going into the industrial.
Yes, sure.
I'll welcome here Keith Prentice, who is our General Manager for Industries. Guy's hands full, as he will outline to you. I'll be joining him, just like I've joined Reinaldo and Iran. He's gonna be talking about our Greent ech industrial lithium processing. He's in the middle of a construction. Keith, you take the podium.
Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks, Ana. Just to start with, my presentation today is gonna outline where we are in terms of current production. It'll touch on phase II and also ongoing improvements in optimization of flow sheets.
That's-
So if we have a look at phase II, we are at the moment we are busy doing the bush clearing for the preparation of the civil works. And that should start within the next month. Obviously, that's gonna be followed by phase II construction, which will be completed next year. And then, in terms of improving processing and flow sheet, as far as phase II goes, what is important to understand is that there's no change to the current flow sheet. It was a deliberate decision taken. We've got a flow sheet that's been improved. We've got equipment that's been improved, bar a couple of small instances, where we're gonna put in slightly bigger machines, same suppliers. But, as far as flow sheet goes, we will not be making any changes.
Inventory management, just to touch on it, optimizing stores. One of the, one of the great advantages going for the same flow sheet for phase II is that, it doesn't impact our inventory. Just the last point is the upgrading of the ultra fines or, sorry, hyper fines. So I'll deal with it in the actual presentation. The production of hyper fines runs at a grade of 1%, and we are looking at methods of upgrading it. Obviously, in the buoyant market, there's a market for it. We sell it. As things tighten up, that market falls away, and so we are busy looking at some novel ideas, novel technologies to upgrade that.
So again, when you go back to the priorities, they run the gamut from detail engineering, earthworks, and then construction, which is one block of what keeps hands full. Then, we have continuous improvement of the current flow sheets, and then Keith will talk about how extracting yield by just doing projects that are like what we call minor CapEx projects, like the purification circuit, increasing the DMS capacity, the screens, basically optimizing the current install capacity we have. And then enhancing the flow sheet of the existing crusher. Again, these are productivity initiatives that can lead us to very positive surprises that could go up to perhaps, you know, what we call low double-digit growth, just doing what we do today. So that's another block of things.
And then, as part of that, there's the element of inventory management and spares, so that we're constantly, well-oiled into, essentially delivering productivity without missing a beat. And then lastly, there's a third block of initiatives which go back to upcycling, right? Essentially, what can we do to basically get even more productivity around the dry stack tailings that we produce?
Mm.
And in addition to the fines, which get easily reprocessed through these CapEx initiatives to increase yields, which are, you know, inexpensive, paid for, deployed, coming into fruition in the fourth quarter, we got the other material, the material that's at 1%, and we produce, you know, around 200,000 tons of that every year. So that's another opportunity for, you know, further yield growth. So that's why we're so optimistic because the current flow sheet, without doing anything, can actually lead us to low double-digit yield enhancement, just even without building phase II, right?
Right.
That's, you know... So that's-
Mm-hmm
... where we're headed, though. But what about imagine that, plus building phase II?
Yeah. So this slide is an aerial view of the current operation. In the foreground, it's all the auxiliary services, infrastructure. Starting on the right-hand side there is obviously the power distribution coming from Cemig. The big storage tank, water tank, is raw water storage. Next to that is the water treatment plant. The white building is a laboratory, analytical lab for all our assays. And then these two buildings on the left are the warehouse and the engineering workshop. The area outlined in yellow, that's the current plant, with the crusher circuit being up at the top right-hand corner, and the DMS plants being in the middle, and then the water treatment dry stacking plants on the left.
The area in the red dotted line is the area that phase II expansion will be constructed. Just a update, as I said, they're busy bush clearing now in preparation for the start of the earthworks.
So now, I think as we explain the product. So we talked about expansions, very straightforward. Again, building, you know, next door to it, leveraging existing infrastructure. You know, we've been talking quite a lot about it. What we wanna highlight here, though, is that we can actually put two lines over there, and this is the reason why we selected that location. 'Cause we can do line two, line three. There's plenty of areas there, again, leveraging on existing infrastructure to deliver on our, we call One Construction, which is gonna take us from here-
Yeah
... all the way through the end of phase III, right?
So if you go back to the-
Yeah
... aerial shot. So the water, the power, obviously, coming from the distribution yard and the water supply. There won't be any increase in the size of that. That'll be taken straight off the existing infrastructure. That is, it has been designed like that, so phase II will not require anything to increase. And much the same with the laboratory, there will be incremental increases, obviously, in number of samples increase, so that will be... Stores, as I said previously, phase II is an identical copy of phase I, and we're specifically not gonna change suppliers. We've had good results from them, so the stores inventory shouldn't grow. Might be slight adjustments, but it shouldn't really grow. And then the workshop will cover both phase I and II.
Yeah. So then, now we talk about doing more, increasing yields, extracting efficiency from the current plant. But I think before we even begin, we wanna show how the elegance in the plant is in the simplicity. So again, we wanna outline to you the plant and its three modules.
As I said earlier, up in the top, the top right there is your crusher module. That preps the feed to the DMS plant, and I'll go into more detail a bit later on. And then in the center of the DMS plant, that's where the separation takes place. In essence, there's three plants there. There's a fines, coarse, and then an ultra-fines plant. And then the third module is a dry stacking, which combines the water recovery. We use roughly 98% recycled water. And included is that, the dry stacking, where you can see the ADT getting loaded next to that little stockpile. The dry stacking, as Ana alluded to earlier, that prevents us having any slime dams. This operation doesn't have any form of slime dam.
Now we go into the heart of the plant, which is module two, and this is where the productivity initiatives kind of play out. This is essentially enhancing productivity with the existing footprint, which will be replicated, carbon copy, into plant two and plant three, meaning extension, and then the third one. First, why zero chemicals? What is it that this technology does, right?
Yes, we use zero chemicals in the process because it's DMS, dense media separation. So the media is made up of ferrosilicon, inert compound of iron and silica. If it does get out of the plant, it does break down naturally in any case. In any event, if you have a look where the plant is situated, we've got both those elements in natural form in any case. So there's no chemical process in the plant. It's pure physical separation based on density.
But it goes back to the elegance being in the simplicity. It is not about crushing rock. It is about detaching that lithium-
Yeah
... crystal away from the host rock, which is schist, which is extremely complex when you think about the way it was done through flotation and uses several chemicals and seventeen steps and acid and what have you. We boil it down to the elegance is in the simplicity-
Correct
... which is what makes it de-risked.
Right.
Now, we're gonna do more about it. We're gonna get better at it.
Correct. So, improving SCADA systems, bringing in artificial intelligence, especially in the operator side of things. You've got to appreciate we're situated in an area that hasn't had a lot of industrialization. So when we started phase I, our operator base basically was non-existent. Most of our operators were recruited, in fact, probably 90% of them from local area, none of them having any form of mining experience or production experience before. But in order to enhance that, obviously, that's got a major benefit for us going into phase II of the same plant.
In order to enhance that with the number of metallurgists, and we've got significant number of metallurgists that have all got experience in spodumene and lithium extraction, we will be putting together artificial intelligence, where it would help the operator in complex situations solve issues on the process plant.
So again, that enhances the yield. And then, again, when you look at the plant, it's the simplicity of it that makes it elegant, and again, optimizing that simplicity, right?
Yeah. So a couple of things that are really important here is the raw water consumption. 35 cubes an hour, that's all the plant uses. As I say, 98% of the water is recirculated. So the process in itself actually is water positive. In other words, we have to get rid of water, which is that is actually the 35 cubes, as we get rid of it, that is sent to the mine for dust suppression. And that's due to a number of things, mainly water-cooled pump, pump lands. The reagents, consumables, typical crusher plant, DMS plants, pumps, screens, wear liners. I touched on the ferrosilicon. Our consumption rate, 530 is well within industry norm.
And we in the process of putting in bigger magnetic separators, because one of the things we discovered during commissioning, so we will put in bigger magnetic separators to even reduce that. And then flocculant, also standard polymer for water clarification.
So the message is very simple, elegant process, but incredibly efficient-
Yeah.
-which is getting more efficient because of, you know, increased automation, implementation of AI in the SCADA system. Here, a bit more. What is the remarkable thing about this, in addition to being simple and elegant, is the water. I mean-
Mm.
you might have picked up, it's water positive, meaning we actually are extremely water efficient.
Yeah.
So you look at the sides, there's not a drop of water. But more importantly, what water is that? As Reinaldo showed, the drinking water preserve, this is sewage water. So one of the things we have is this inbound sewage treatment station, to clear up this sewage water that we get, right?
Correct. So the water is pumped directly out of the river, and then pumped into a water treatment plant. So all our process water is cleaned before it actually goes into the process. And that would be talking now about the 35 cubes an hour, because obviously, the remainder being that we need for the process is being recycled through the thickener. That is the thickener circuit, recycling the water. At the bottom right there, you've got your process water reservoir, that feeds all-
Mm.
All processes, sub-processes in the plant. The area in the dotted red line, that is the product of the belt filter, the hyper fines, that is stacked. So the thickener underflow coming out of the thickener, here on the left-hand side, that is pumped to the vacuum belt filter, and then that is dewatered to roughly 80% moisture, and then quite easy stackable. Currently, that is just getting stockpiled for when the market turns, we would start selling it. With the work that we're doing, in the likely event of us getting a suitable process for upgrading it, those stockpiles will be retreated to bring them up to a saleable grade.
Yeah. And that will be, you know, anything around 4%.
Correct.
So if you can take 1% and make it 4%, there's a pretty decent market for it.
Yeah.
It's kind of the grade of some of our peers in Australia.
Mm.
There you have it. We got another, you know-
Yeah
... whole load out of, you know, what was then, would have been tailings, but it becomes dry-stacked material, reusable.
Correct. And then, obviously, it's got a major impact on transportation to the port.
It goes back to what are we using? Simplicity. Going back to module one, crusher, simple, straightforward.
Yeah.
This is almost like, you know, anywhere, any place you've got a crusher, a mobile crusher, is the easy part of what we do. We got a large crusher, it can be complemented by mobile crushers or not, what have you. So is a simple part of this plant. This is not where the magic happens.
Right. Yeah, it's a straightforward crushing circuit, common in many minerals, common in quarries. Nothing too fantastic about it. What's not shown here clearly is the jaw crusher. Jaw crusher is majorly overdesigned for a specific reason. Reinaldo touched on the problem of fines, ultra fines or hyper fines, due to blasting. The crusher circuit's primary function is to reduce the material to -9.5 mm, and that is the optimum liberation size of our feed. That has been tested in the plant as well. We've actually tested it on a full scale, and we've proved that that is the maximum that we go up to. But at the same time, the other critical thing in the crusher plant is that we don't generate hyper fines.
Hyper fines go to the belt filter, report directly, don't go through any DMS plant. So they would be lost. I mean, if we had excessive hyper fines going through the plant, they would be lost. So the crushing circuit, as well as making sure everything's under 9.5 mm, has to make sure that we don't generate these hyper fines.
And now, the improvements in the crusher circuit that we're working through-
So-
—is to change, go to Vibamech and change the design of it, right?
Correct. With some of the problems that we've had, specifically on the crusher screens, we've resized and gone back to suppliers, and we have found our current screening is probably limited, not by much, but it is. We will be increasing the size of those screens, improving screening efficiency and reducing the generation of fines. Most of the fines is generated in the tertiary crushing circuit, that's in closed circuit. If you don't get rid of the material at that screening point, it goes into closed circuit and gets crushed again, and that's when the generation of excessive fines occurs.
Again, improving efficiency, very simple process to be made whole, complemented by mobile set of crushers. This is not where the magic happens.
Right.
Here is where the magic happens, right?
Yep.
This is where we separate the crystal from the host rock.
As I've said earlier, three DMS plants and they each treat different size fractions. You've got your fines and coarse fraction are screened out, so it's + 1.7 mm-9.5 mm. And then that fraction is actually split. It can be split at 6.3, it can be split at 4, with the intention of getting 50% into each of those DMS circuits. Both of these circuits are double stage, first stage and second stage. And then you've got your ultra fines circuit, so your - 1.7 is screened again at 0.5, and that goes into also a two-stage DMS plant.
At the end of the process, we've got magnetic separators just to increase the grade of the final concentrate. Reflux classifiers at the start of the fines and ultra fine circuits are there for the removal of mica. Our ore body, to date, we haven't had a mica problem, so we don't use a reflux classifiers. There's no need to use a reflux classifiers at this point.
And then again, why are we showing this? Because it's important, so that you would understand how can we possibly extract productivity from an existing circuit? Is essentially optimizing the material that gets fed into the DMS.
True.
The capacity constraint goes here. Capacity of 228 tons per hour, that's fixed. Now, the better the quality, meaning the more purified, devoid of impurities, screened, prepared material we have feeding into it, as you explained to us, the better the yield.
That's it.
So by preparing, we have productivity enhancement, which is a segue to what is it that we're doing now in this quarter.
It gets back to the hyper fines generated in the crusher circuit. If you've got excessive hyper fines getting generated by your crushers, you're actually displacing recoverable material. So if you've got a fixed tonnage of 228, you could add 30% or 40% hyper fines, you're actually displacing material that could be reported to the DMS, and that's what it's about. The other thing that we are looking at, or not looking at, we are in the process of upgrading our final concentrate screens are not a bottleneck at 228 tons, but they are a bottleneck going higher than that.
We've actually run this plant. This plant has run at 250 tons per hour for 24 hours without any problems, except for the final product screens.
Let me pause it there. That means 800 and-
Probably 900 tons of concentrate-
900 tons-
-per day
... of concentrate per day. So 900 tons of concentrate per day, we've done that-
Yeah
... by preparing the material that goes into the plant.
Yeah.
So 900 tons a day times, you know, number of usage days, 28 days. This is what it can do. If we accelerate, that's where it goes. Now, how do we prepare this, right? And that's the point.
So these projects have been going on for probably the best part of four months. Obviously, to get these screens built, they come out of South Africa, so they're not off the shelf. I mean, they're bespoke built for our operation. So those two screens are already on site, so that project will be completed within the next month, and then on the ultra fine circuit, there's a similar project being tackled. The screen is due next month.
So again, what does it do? So this is why at 900 tons a day, 800 becomes norm, which means 22,000 tons a month is essentially the cadence.
Mm.
That's why we're so relaxed about that number and give out that number so regularly, because there's confidence that that's absolutely-
Mm
... you know, regularity, you know, steady state. Can it be better? Yes, but we're not even guiding for it. Going back to how, is essentially pre-purifying, preparing, delivering better material into a constrained capacity. Now, what is the bonus? Well, we've got a pile of fines sitting there from the commissioning period at 1.5%, which we talk about here later on, so that can be reprocessed. More importantly, to Keith's point, what happens to it on an ongoing basis? Walk us through it.
Yeah.
How can-
So the ultra fines, the ultra fines DMS was the last piece of plant to be commissioned, for various reasons. Obviously, our money spinner is the fines and the coarse, and that one took precedence. So we've got roughly 100,000 tons of ultra-fine feed available. So part of the upgrading of the screen is the installation of a recovery circuit conveyor hopper system, that we will treat that ultra fines, and produce a ultra fines concentrate. One of the things we had to look at when the market was still buoyant is actually selling that stock pile. And at the time, there was considerable interest from all over the world for it, because it runs at a grade of 1%, ideally suited for flotation feed.
That is the plan with ultra fines.
And then again, what we're doing next is working ourselves to treat that, which is part of the, you know, technological partnership with the BNDES FINEP that we're working on. But then again, back to inside the circuit, inside this Greentech plant. So what is it? So we got DMS slash-
Mm.
Go ahead.
Yeah, DMS cyclones, those are separation cyclones. I'm not exactly sure which stage it is. It look like secondary cyclones. Screening. So, one of the key things in the DMS is to recover the ferrosilicon. Ferrosilicon is... It's expensive and it's important, so it's critical that we maximize our recovery. Magnetic separators, and I think that's just the feed box to the cyclone feed pumps. Again, just more photographs of the DMS, product screens-
Sorry.
that are gonna be upgraded. Both of these product screens will be upgraded.
And again, we basically continue the productivity initiatives and maintain, the concept of optimizing the DMS, so that we can push recoveries, push the yields to levels never, ever before achieved by a process that doesn't involve flotation. So we're achieving just superb recoveries, superb plant recoveries. We don't even give out plant recoveries-
Yeah.
We give global finer recoveries.
Mm
in a DMS, which is the first time in the industry ever when this has been achieved.
Yeah.
But again, it's not one magic bullet, it's this combination of initiatives.
Correct. And just on the recoveries, if we are able to upgrade the ultra fines to a saleable or near concentrate grade, and we include that into our recoveries, we're gonna, it's gonna be, I think, unheard of recoveries on a DMS circuit.
Yeah. We'll talk a bit more about that later.
Mm.
Again, the fact that we've gone through all of this, right? It enables us to deliver what it is, basically, the world's best and most efficient pre-concentrate, pre-chemical lithium in the world. It's what we call, the Australians call it chemical grade, because it tees up for high purity refined lithium hydroxide and lithium concentrate. It's the best material in the world. It's green, meaning it's granulated, it's high purity, low mica, low iron, low alkaline, and the quality is quite visible, and you can see that with naked eye. Essentially, you know, it's a very big difference from the slushy material with iron oxide, and that is the work that, you know, we're trying to pick up from the industrial team into the commercial team and translate it into a premium.
Now that we talked about the Greent ech plant, we're gonna talk about the optimization. It'll be easier for all of you to understand where all these initiatives kinda come together for this, you know, increased potential yields that, you know, we believe can be as high as the low double digits, right?
Okay. The first graph on the left, top left, it is a utilization of the DMS plant. The horizontal line is actually the target at 85%. As you can see, we run that plant typically 90%-93% utilization, so running it way over target. But the interesting thing, and probably the most important thing, is the ramp-up. We started commissioning in May 2023, and we went up and basically, as you can see, took two months to get to target, and since then it's been on target constantly. Below that is our recovery grade curve, and we've proved through plant performance, full-scale performance, we follow the curve.
The curve was developed by SGS during the feasibility phase of the project, and the plant performance follows that curve very accurately. So what does it mean? So as the grade decreases, we find a decrease in recovery. It is typical for spodumene plants. We've touched on the screens. And the last point, they're testing the plant to find out the ceiling. So that's how we ran the plant at the DMS plant at 250 tons an hour, to identify where is the ceiling, where is the bottleneck, and the screens are the bottleneck. We will again, once those new screens go in, we will again ramp it up to find out where we can run it comfortably, obviously not overload it.
But if there is, we don't believe there is anything that will bottleneck it at 250 ton an hour.
Exactly, which is the 900 tons a day-
Yeah
... which is a number that, you know, as you can calculate, to significantly increase our yield.
Yeah.
So this is just what we can do with existing capacity-
Correct
... which, again, subsidizes our comfort, right? So again, it's doing more with what we have, and these are targets for when all these initiatives will be completed.
Okay. So the reprocessing circuit that's on the hyper fines, touched on that. The screening capacity on the hyper fines was undersized. We had a number of instances in the plant where equipment itself has been, I wouldn't say insignificantly sound, but it is on it's borderline where it can just handle or just can't handle the feed. So that screen, that trash screen will be increased to process the tailings and as well to treat 100% of the current ultra-fine production coming out of the screening circuit. The last point is the permanent fix on the crusher screens. Again, from suppliers, we were advised that our current screens were undersized. And that is due first quarter 2025.
Those screens are being manufactured at the moment, and they will be shipped to Brazil, probably in January next year for installation in Q1. What I've got to say as well, that all of these improvements that we've detected and we've found on phase I, all of them have been incorporated into the phase II design. One of the changes, not to the flow sheet, but one of the changes that we will be implementing, on the aerial photograph, you might have seen, we've got a ore bin with a conveyor - a draw out conveyor underneath it. And we found it has limitations in terms of capacity, and it has got a loadout facility.
This?
But it's far better to go to a stockpile.
This?
Yeah, you can see it up there on the right-hand side, that long, tubular-
Yeah, the silo, right?
Yeah, silo.
The silo, exactly.
Ore bin.
The silo-like structure-
Yeah
... the ore bin.
So that will be replaced by a stockpile.
Yeah, right there.
Mm.
Yeah.
Stockpile being bigger capacity is easier to control, and when you got excess material, it's a case of just using a small bulldozer to push it out.
So then, going back to the numbers, so, today, we kinda run on average 750 tons a day, pretty straightforwardly.
Yeah
... given that some of these productivity measures have been implemented. And again, what we wanna emphasize that there's not one magic bullet, it's a whole system approach.
Mm-hmm.
Which is what allows us to go comfortably from what we're guiding in the third quarter, which is gonna be around 20,000 tons in the third quarter, easily into what we, you know, aim to do, which is the 22,000 a month. That will probably, again, if you think about the 900 tons a day as we reach first quarter, it means we can even go and extract more productivity out of the plant, which just shows how we have full domain of DMS at this point.
Correct.
How straightforward it will be-
Mm
... phase II and phase III.
Yeah.
And on that?
The other thing is, the obvious thing as well, as I said, you know, we started at a very low-skilled space on the operators, on the operations. As we month on month, our operators are getting more and more and better skilled in the operating of the circuits.
So now we're gonna go into the dry stacking.
Yeah
... which kinda leads segue into the conversation about the initiatives. In addition to what we talked about, well, there's material here.
Correct.
There's material. When the prices were in the upcycle of lithium in 2022, 2023, they had a market, but now they sit here.
Right.
We learned at that stage what customers did with it, which was throw into flotation plants and concentrate it to 4%. We can do that, again, without a flotation plant. That's the challenge. We're gonna do it, but the Sigma way, without tailings dams.
Yep.
So as we enter the dry stacking module, we'll talk a bit more about why do we believe that's possible.
Correct. As Ana said, the grade of the dry stacking product in the stockpile here runs at 1%. Ideal, as I said before, ideally suited for flotation, but we're not gonna go the flotation route. Well, we have already engaged with laboratories overseas to investigate ways of separating it, with the view of upgrading it to as close as we can get to a concentrate grade. I did mention that any upgrade has got a significant impact on transport. If you can upgrade it to 2% or 3%, I mean, it's 2/3 of your transport costs reduced.
Any upgrade, well, he's giving you an example, 2%-3%, because whatever it is that we do with it, we save.
Yeah.
And so the material is currently sitting there in piles. The cost of the material to go from our site to China is $120, but that's the only cost it has, because it is a by-product of the plant.
Mm.
So other than this, the objective is to make it valuable up to above that level-
Right
... by concentrating to any level.
Right.
The goal is 4%, but as Keith was saying, 2%-3% is great, and we can extract, you know, another perhaps two boats out of this. And let's talk about connecting this to what Rogerio and Matt were talking about regarding development bank financing. One of these plants were run inside $25 million, so that's fully funded with development bank financing. In this case, grants, because this is pure innovation. Again, we're moving away from flotation into DMS. So we wanna leave this here because we haven't guided to this, we haven't projected this. This is not in the numbers we gave, but it just shows that there's yield to be extracted from the current circuit, from the current facilities, and we are working on that now, which is Keith's favorite project-
Yeah
... is actually to deliver this, right?
Yeah. And as I said earlier, it's got a major impact, because as soon as we make a product out of this, we will add that to our recovery.
Yeah.
And that has a major impact.
So the dry stacking, which was, you know, what delayed us from April to July 2023, is now been running beautifully, and in fact, is one of the biggest prides of the company. 'Cause it takes just the right amount of moisture to produce what we call the cake, and you can see it in the picture, is the 12% cake that has to come out-
Yeah
... right?
Yeah. That's a stacking cake coming off the vacuum filter.
We use the same dry stacker for phase II. So again-
Correct
... we've been through the pains, I mean, because it's important to highlight, no one has this, right? So this is the one circuit that no one-
Yeah
has ever done before.
Again, getting back to the spares, we've got significant spares and we, you know, like vacuum pumps and had very expensive spares for this dry stacking circuit. So when we move on to phase II, none of that will be required.
Exactly. So all the delays in commissioning from April 2023 to July, we won't experience again because now we got-
No, not, not-
the perfect, you know-
Correct
... drawing of this circuit, which was totally redesigned.
If we have a look why we had so many problems, part of the issue, the test work, the filtration test work done by SGS was based on core samples. It wasn't typically representative of our mine feed, our run-of-mine feed. Hence, it was far more coarser, far less ultra fines in it or hyper fines. So their test work showed that it dewatered and filtered a lot faster than it actually does. So it took a lot of test work on the mine itself with different reagents to get it into a phase where it is now, where we can run it without problem.
This is one of the biggest prides we had, because this is kind of making what's really hard look simple.
Mm.
I mean, it's been a year since we've been running this to perfection.
Yeah.
That is the circuit that no one has.
Mm-hmm.
The circuit-
There, here it sits at the bottom.
Yeah.
The bottom left.
Exactly.
Mm.
Keith completely redesigned this and rethought it, and it was a multiple disciplined approach to getting this right. But we've been, you know, delivering this for a year, so it's something that makes us very proud.
I think that this photo could have been one of the earlier photos, just looking at the color of the water, and then if you have a look at all the water after the dry stackers, it was probably during commissioning, this photo.
Yeah, it was. You see there's still water-
Yeah
... in the back there. We hadn't gotten the-
Yeah
... the percentage correct on the cake at that stage.
Yeah.
Exactly. Now, there's not a drop of water.
Mm.
Which goes back to all of these were year-long lessons that we learned. We basically kept the plane flying, and they're gonna be seamlessly deployed into phase II, which comes out with the full benefit of a perfected flow sheet. That's the cake.
Yep.
12%. If it gets, you know, wrong soils, right?
Yeah, that's-
One point that's important on the cost, why are we so efficient on processing cost? It's important to remind that tailings dams are not just an environmental issue, they're a cost issue. I mean, maintaining a tailings dam to high operational standards and safety costs, and it costs forever because it doesn't go anywhere as the company finalizes operations. So when a mine closes, which is what we've been highlighting here, the tailings dam leaves the permanent contingencies, liabilities, permanent operating cost, which is kind of how, you know, we approached it when we started to design this Greent ech plant back in the first feasibility. So what happens to it? Well, that is the big question of our industry. Who knows what happens a hundred years from now?
Yeah.
So what we're trying to do is to show that there's actually a way to address it and tackle it, and in fact, extract productivity out of it by upcycling the material-
True
... and you know, and maintaining the lowest processing cost in the world. That's what we have today at Sigma.
Yeah, and it also prevents, you know, any future cost of dismantling a tailings dam, decommissioning it-
Exactly
... which can be considerable.
Exactly, and then here is the, you know, the segue into what we're talking about, right? We're taking the Chinese approach, which is efficiency. Nothing goes to waste, and we learned with our customers in China, meaning upcycling, even the material that has zero lithium-
Yep
... right?
So, yeah, this is a reject fraction. That's the float fraction coming out of the DMS that is being used to make pavers for the local communities.
So that's paving roads and building, you know, paving blocks. So even the zero goes to being used towards our social license, and we talk about it in the next block. Then we process what we just discussed. So everything gets reused, recycled, repurposed, which is the Chinese approach. Nothing goes to waste, which is a very big, valuable lesson as we enter into our expansion plans three years from now, doing lithium chemicals. And I think to wrap, Keith has been, you know, breaking records now. We're basically the second in ICMM on the zero accidents target.
Yeah. It's incredible, incredible achievement, considering the... as again, the skills base that we came off, where we had operators never seen a conveyor, never worked with a conveyor. It's remarkable, and that's just the performance of the production team that they got us here, and together with the EHS.
A testament to your leadership.
Mm-hmm.
This is not a small accomplishment. There's only one company in the entire universe of metals and mining companies, and that includes just about everyone that's ranked better than Sigma. Considering that we're a new producer, we've been running this for a little bit over a year, it's something to be very proud of, and we're going past a year now. We're going a year and a quarter.
Yeah, yeah... three.
390 days. It's something we're very proud of, because it is not just about this, sending the workers safely home again. It's this culmination and coordination of procedures and processes and safety, considering that we started with a relatively low human capital base. Because marrying this, coupling this with an 85% local workforce, is actually the small miracle we operated, right?
Yeah, and again, you know, for phase II, it's that is gonna be the massive advantage we've got. No, we're not starting from a zero base now, we're starting with skilled operators, as a core at least. With a plant that they're familiar with, equipment they're familiar with, work cycles that they're familiar with, and operating procedures that's all basically in place.
Yeah. And again, this is a demonstration that we can do this. We can actually run this, operate this with the world's higher, higher standards, even in a region that we actually set out to develop from scratch using local workers. So this is actually showing that it is possible, which goes back to the point I made earlier for low-cost producing regions. If we deliver this in our region, any region, in places like Africa and all over the world, can do this. So it's more like I bring it up with a can-do attitude. Why not raise the bar of the industry like we did, right?
Right.
These are the exercises in daily health and safety dialogue, so it's a daily practice, it's a daily effort. Every day, the commitment that we embraced with our workers is they will go in, and they'll come home safe, safe. They'll come home unscathed. These are the facilities we set out to support these goals, so there's an ambulance there which sits unused, which is fantastic.
With paramedics.
Exactly, paramedics and a full clinic.
Yeah, fully equipped.
But our goal is to keep this ambulance right there.
Yeah.
So with that, we will start with ESG. We...
Lunch is served.
Lunch is served, so it's a working lunch, so we can do a five-minute pause, get lunch, and continue on, and we'll go in with ESG.
Thank you.
... Okay, back guys. So we'll continue with the wrap, which we left the best for last. So we're gonna go with the ESG section of our presentation, and again, this being Climate Week, is a nice way to wrap and go about our Climate Week event. So for that, I will invite Maria, Fádwa Andrade, who is our director of social initiatives and social projects, and then Maria Salum, who's our sustainability guru. She's been the co-chair of our ESG committee to the board, advisor, senior advisor to the board, since 2019. She steered this journey with us. So Fádwa and Maria will continue on this with a talk show format, and I will present the key slides just to give us space. And with that, we will we will-...
Start with a video?
Mm-hmm.
Just do the setup, so just take one of the chairs. Yeah. We'll start with a video.
Hey, hey. Hey, hey. Testing one, two.
So that just shows it, right? We're very proud of what we did, and without further ado, we will start with our key ESG priorities. So what are the four key initiatives that we got? First is, again, the regular environmental set of activities, and we wanna highlight that we're missing our Director of Environmental, Alex, who stayed behind in Brazil, 'cause he's gone through kidney surgery, and he's doing-
Yeah
... extremely well. He's back on site, back to normal, but he wasn't cleared to travel. So he's the third chair missing over there. We're keeping the chair open for him. So the licensing, that's the regular process we call, you know, the permitting. It's gone very well. Our state is incredibly expeditious, and again, it's important to highlight that we typically take the long road in permitting. Our permits take on average two and a half years. So it's essentially a planning purpose, a planning project of applying for permitting well before we need to license any area, anything, what have you. We have nine permits to date, which means it goes very well. We've never had a permitting issue. So but it's work that needs to be done. So again, there's that focus.
There's a whole team focused on that, preparing impact studies, preparing studies, preparing filings. So it's a pretty seamless process for us, and this is why we plan ahead because we never have any bottlenecking, even though it does take long. It takes two and a half years, or sometimes three years, but it doesn't matter because we plan ahead. The next thing that we need to we focus on is always another ongoing task, is to reduce the environmental footprint of mining, and we're really innovating here. We have a plan to do complete regeneration of waste piles, basically implementing organic polymers. And then we have another strategy around minimization of blasting effects, dust management. The third initiative, it's continuous social support plan for communities as we advance in advance.
In other words, as you saw from Reinaldo's presentation, as we're moving to potentially opening a mine in the southern complex, as you heard from Reinaldo and Iran, in 2026 , we already finished the school, and we opened the school, and we're gonna have a big opening ceremony two weeks from now, meaning two years ahead. That's how we build our social license. It's planning in advance with everything, working in advance and building the relationship with the community when we're just neighbors. So that two years from now, when we have to open that mine, that's our operating license because we'll be interacting with that community. This is how we've done all these years. So we also have a childcare center. Both constructions have been completed, opening now, but again, we're just gonna become neighbors' neighbors, two and...
two, two and a half years from now, so. But we plan ahead, move ahead, initiate relationships ahead. And then lastly is, basically, Fádwa's main focus now is the various, what we call, projects of social initiatives because it's more than the ongoing. It's essentially what we call legacy massive impact, is the productive inclusion initiatives, and we'll talk about here how do they tie up with the job and wealth creation of the mines to avoid the dichotomy of having the haves versus the have-nots. So we have the microcredit, which has, 2,000 micro businesses consolidated. We have the Water for All program, which again, increases the reach, in the community, to almost 100%. We're moving into the very last community that has 768 families, and then we have the irrigation, for small scale agriculture, which has 1,400 farmers.
So these are very massive numbers for our region, and hence, the percentages of over 50% of the economically active population, which is sizable, in benefiting from all that we're doing. So four fronts, two fronts ongoing, which is called ongoing improvement, and then two fronts, what we call social relationship building. So environmental focus is on the two fronts ongoing, and then social relationship building is where social and environmental merge in what we call social dialogue, which is a combination of special products and impact programs, and the ongoing dialogue with the neighboring communities. At that stage, communities that are neighbors will become neighbors, and then what we call productive inclusion, which is, you know, has a life of its own. And that's where Fádwa spends most of her time these days.
Without further ado, I'll go into why do we do it that way? Look at our region, right? It's essentially a region that looks more like Bangladesh, and essentially, if you look at the slides, it's basically a Bangladesh setup there versus the state of Minas Gerais. It's the poorest region in the state, but not just that, it's the poorest region in the country. When you operate in a region like that, the social license that's earned becomes the operating license, and this is the result of quite a lot of purpose, because it's not about ESG. It's in fashion, it's out of fashion. It's about the reason why we're building this with a solid foundation. Now, we've garnered federal support, funding, development bank support through BNDES.
We've had the state support through the processes of, you know, typically, committing to ensure the flow of our permits. Again, we've had nine permits, which is, you know, seamless. We've never been. We're one of the fastest built, so we've never been stopped by any of the permits required, meaning we planned well, and the state is there. The state, federal there with development banking, so it's an alliance. It's what we call a cause. It's an alliance between state and federal to develop this region that kind of translated into this initiative called Lithium Valley, and we are, you know, the locomotive of that valley.
It's the commitment of our largest reference shareholder, A10 Fund, represented by Marcelo, which has been weathering being here since 2017, when the fund was initiated, when the fund was created. It takes that level of purpose. You need an impact fund, a group of shareholders that's committed to this. This. We were joined by other very large and very relevant shareholders, namely BlackRock, Nuveen, Fitch, you know, all of the group of shareholders that has this coalition built, that brought resilience to what we're doing. I mean, synergy, again, well, the list is endless. The list of shareholders is pretty stable because we all are.
We're here to solve for the long term, and at the long term, there is- there has been a sizable amount of value created, and we're just at the beginning of it, as we've shown. So it's that sort of coalition that is required, the partnership for the goals to deliver what we're delivering, and this is what we've done. This is there. This already happened. So 1,500 direct jobs, 13,000 indirect jobs, 21,000 job openings through the social inclusion program, 18,000 people with access to drinking water. Again, it's 100% adherence, right? 85% regional workforce, 50% of the economically active population benefited. 3,000,000 meals a year is a stark reminder of where we are. We still feed people. We're never able to remove the protective net-
Mm-hmm
... that we set out during the pandemic, so it's still there. 270,000 meals a month, 3,000,000 meals a year, but the region is evolving away from it. We're showing a 20% GDP growth in this region, which is basically a miracle, right? And hence, the unanimity that the Lithium Valley became, and now we're joined by prominent neighbors. And again, we raised the bar so high that the entire modus operandi of successful companies in that region will basically reach the high bar. And now, especially now that we're joined by the greats, the great companies in the world, in our sector, in metals and mining, are investing in the region. Now, what was the key to create shared prosperity?
It's, again, this effort, the purpose of raising the bar, combining the initiatives of social inclusion with industrial jobs and income generation. So essentially, this is what we call the wheel of prosperity, and this is economic development theory. This is not something we created. We went to the World Bank, to the biggest development institutions globally, and we looked for best practices, and this is one of the key best practices of how they operate in places like Southeast Asia, poor regions, and Africa. Meaning, you go in with resources, industrial jobs, and you create a group of direct and indirect people benefiting from it. This is the group of the haves, the wealth... and then you move in to the group of have-nots. If you leave them behind, there's gonna be conflict. It's inevitable. Now, how do you win a regional support?
How do you create this wheel of prosperity? You create social inclusion, and the programs for social inclusion are quite basic because there's no time for essentially skilling or re-skilling. You need to work with the skills they have, hence microcredit, which we borrowed again from best practices in Southeast Asia, in Bangladesh, and small-scale agriculture irrigation, which is an example that exists in Africa, and Maria and our team borrowed from Brazil. So essentially, this includes two groups of vulnerable people, women and small-scale farmers, that were the have-nots, that were left behind. So they once they're included, they create the offering of products and services that are actually consumed by the wealth created with direct and indirect jobs.
There's a transfer of wealth from the salaries and the wealth created in metals and mining towards the individuals benefiting from social inclusion, and hence, the positive and unequivocal support we receive from the community. I'll give you a few numbers. The community has about... both cities have about 57,000 people. In Brazil, you would need only 50 signatures to create a public hearing. We've been there for 12 years.
Okay.
We never had a public hearing, meaning one cannot garner 50 signatures on a page against us. This is the scale of our support. It would take 50 people, hasn't happened, because the community is here with us. So why? Here is why, and that doesn't cost a lot of money, and again, the fact we're amongst, you know, second, third lowest cost in the world demonstrate that. It is possible. So with that, I'll go straight into net zero with Maria. So, here is what happens in our neighborhood, in our sector, right? Typically, lithium coming from rock mining would generate 24 tons of carbon or 13 tons of carbon per ton of material. Lithium generated from brines would generate about nine tons of carbon per ton of material. We generate 0.26. Here it is.
Yeah.
It's a fraction. Look, a fraction of brine, and that's a result of all that we've shown you technologically in what we call the Greent ech Plan. This is why it's the Greent ech Plan. Here is a number, 0.26 tons of carbon per ton, is what the climate community here now gathered in New York for Climate Week calls under one, and that's what allows us to offset this 0.26 tons balance with carbon credits. So very straightforward calculation, and again, most of it comes from mining, hence Reinaldo's point about these initiatives. We're constantly looking at biofuels, hybrid, to decrease that diesel, right? When we done the study, we also learned blasting was, if you look there, is another source of that carbon. So again, it's transport, diesel and transport, mining, diesel and mining. So that's kinda where it is.
Like you look diesel trucking, ANFO, which is nitrates, explosions, and then diesel and mining, so it's all about diesel, but still, 0.27 tons or kilograms per kilograms or 0.27 tons per ton, under one, in a hard-to-abate industry. This is kind of a name, hard to abate. It has never happened, and we've shown that it can happen. So that puts us in a special position, being able to drive an entire chain to be low carbon, meaning 100% of refining is in China today, but the best-in-class just generate 2.5 tons, so they're fantastic over there. So with 2.5 tons of carbon added to the ton of lithium through the refining, meaning best-in-class are what? Those that use natural gas and clean power.
So we can actually deliver a carbon-minus product to end up with a zero-carbon chemical even in China, which is wow! But why? Because the best-in-class are actually that good. That's why the industry doesn't leave there, because it's zero waste, 2.5 tons of carbon. It is that good. So that ties back to the strategy we talked about earlier, about why would we sell lithium sulfates to China? It isn't just a Western-targeted supply, it's a China-targeted supply, too, 'cause we can sell what we call carbon-minus lithium sulfates, and we have a sizable market there for this because it makes complete sense, economically, obviously, but also from an overall enabling of sustainability purpose.
Here's how the chemicals with materials sourced from the different sources would end up in terms of carbon, which shows that being zero carbon makes us the axis of delivering what we call zero-carbon chemicals, which is the holy grail of our industry, and we can do it. This is it. It could happen as early as tomorrow, right? If there's a client interested in carbon minus, so very straightforward. The grid enables the decarbonization, and a key to being low carbon is the grid. The grid is clean, is renewable. We buy 100% renewable power at fixed five-year contract at $0.02 a kilowatt hour. So it's one of the cheapest sources of renewable power in the world. It just loses to Saudi Arabia, which is $0.01.
So again, that is an important element 'cause we do not have to clean carbon from coal-based grid, from fossil fuels-based grid. We don't need to run on diesel generators as some of these new operations in Africa are running. So we really have this luxury, but we've done our homework. This is what we call Scope 2. We've done the homework on Scope 1, which means we worked on our industrial operations. So we've done the homework, and that's kinda how we ended up so well, and that's how we ended up zeroing out the carbon. At 0.26 tons inside one, we were able to achieve carbon neutrality by basically zeroing out the 0.26 tons, which is nothing. Being inside one is a luxury, and at that, we are hailing the importance of carbon credits because the...
It's the bottom-up effort to stop deforestation, given that one is to put food on the table of the Amazon man in order to keep the forest up, to keep the forest standing. You need regulation to prevent for illegal deforestation, but also working top-down, but also work bottom-up, meaning that man we call the guardian of the forest needs to eat. They live in houses like this. This comes from an actual project. That person there is my son, and when you look at these trees, these trees are worth BRL 30 million, which is about $6 million each, and they guard it. And they receive, essentially the equivalent of, max $1,000 a month on guarding the forest. But if they receive something, they will guard a $6 million dollar tree with their lives.
If they don't, the $6 million tree will go because it's basic economics, right? We do reforestation program, which just support the carbon initiatives, but the big things are in the hard to abate. So now we move to a second important initiative, which is reducing the environmental footprint of the mining, which is what we call regeneration.
Okay.
So, Maria.
Yeah.
Good afternoon. Ana, I would like to point out something about our LCA. That number, that is really small, it was obtained it with our engineering project. So when we received the report, we acted on a lot of things that we can really move, we can really change to make our number smaller, and it happened. For example, about explosives, we bought some. It's very special software that can regulate how much explosive we need to use to reduce our CO2 emission. We did that. So our number nowadays with the operation is smaller than 0.27. So, and about what we are doing to recover the areas that we are mining, it's very important because this is really to be ESG.
We are, for example, thinking that everything that really borders something like that, the community is not only social things, is environmental. The environmental impacts, it really is bothering the communities. For example, we have this application of polymers in all of our piles to recover, to really don't give to the community dust. Dust is a problem. It's an environmental problem, but it's also a social problem. So it's what we have using the polymers in the areas that we mined. The other one, regeneration-
That's how it looks like after a year and a half, right? It's like-
Yeah.
Fascinating.
It's unbelievable-
Yeah
...what happens, and it... we can see, in the six months, what happened with the polymers used. And it's applied also, not only in the piles, but always in the roads, community roads, and inside our site roads.
And that's where you see the waste piles over there. It looks like-
Wow
... a hill. Like, look at that one. It's the oldest waste pile is 18 months, which kind of dates back-
Yeah
... to when we, you know, were opening that mine. It looks like a hill. So there's, it's even visual impact, dust impact, it's regeneration-
Yeah
... as we mine, which is a completely-
Yeah
... different concept than waiting for it to close and just doing regeneration. Regenerate the pile.
Exactly.
The same pile, they'll go back to cover the hole, right?
Yeah. Of course.
That's an important point, because it's interesting, 'cause even walking through this with the stakeholders is, you know, the waste pile needs to sit next to the pit, because otherwise we can't do mine closure.
Yeah.
Fine. So but as the waste pile sits next to the pit, and we apply polymers, it actually looks more and more like part of, you know, the scenery. It looks like a hill. If you look there, you can see the terracing-
Mm
... with the fully grown vegetation.
Yeah. We know that the area will not be the same after mine. We know that. But we need, we have the responsibility to make this area all best as we can, what the technology offers to us to recover mining areas. Okay?
Yeah.
And we are doing, really, we are doing this. Another ongoing. Okay, next slide, please. So, as I told before, social and environmental actions comes together in Sigma. So when we think about to monitor vibration, the sound, dust, and after dust, another thing that is vibration, dust.
And noises.
Noises. Every board are all the this impact are measured by environmental-wide area, but together social area, and together mining area. We work together as a really an ESG team: social, environmental area, and technical area, what includes mining and mineral processing areas. It's why we can have really good results in ESG. Why you have the we have the support of the communities? Because we work as a team. Okay? For example, we measure every day dust, noise, and vibration.
Mm.
We have a legal limit, but we don't work with the legal limit. We work always hearing what the community is saying. Sometimes we have our, for example, dust below the legal demand, but it's not enough for us.
Yes.
We go to the community, and we measure it with them what's happened. "No, it's not good. There are some dust." "Okay, Reinaldo, please, what we need to do to work with dust, with vibration or noise during our blasting." So it's what we are doing. You are really having a lot of success improving, for example, blasting. It is happening, and I think that this is really ESG. Okay? So Fádwa.
Fádwa.
At least I would like to say that we really have a kind of assistance programs. Yes, we have it, but we have much more than this. We are building a sustainable community. It's what is important for us.
And with that, I'll start with a video of.
Mm-hmm
... one of our greatest prides and joys.
Hi, good afternoon. Is it working? Yeah. Okay. So I'll start. I'd like to start just reinforcing what Ana said before. All of this that we are presenting started before the operation. Yes, our commitment came before the operation, yes, before we start producing in the implementation phase. So it's important to reinforce this. And another point is that, everything that we do, we do base it on technical studies, with a robust institutional agenda, in partnership with local governments, yes, and listening to the community. It's a participatory way of doing things. So nothing that I'm going to present here right now was decided only by Sigma. We decided it together. Yes. Maria said something very important. Maria, thank you for remind me. It's about our internal team. So, I'm responsible for the social.
Alexandre, who's not here now, but he's responsible all today of community relations, and also for environmental. Reinaldo, for the mining. Keith, for the plant. So we discuss everything together before the decisions, and I if I have anything related to the community, complaints or something like that, I'll go to Reinaldo and also to Keith, and we can discuss together and find solutions together before going to the community. We go together to the community. Another point that I would like to say is that everything that we are doing, we have KPIs to monitor all the implementation of these social programs, because we are neighbor, we are part of the territory development. So we need to understand very well if what we are doing will bring the results that we are all together looking for.
Ana has already introduced the microcredit program. Yes, this is my flag now. Yes, and I'm very happy because of it. So, just to give an idea about the region, Itinga has 49.7% of women, and that Araçuaí has 51%. So they are born with the need of support their families, and they need to strengthen their skills to do that. Very strong woman, but the majority doesn't go to the college, doesn't have the opportunity to go to the college, even to complete the basic education. Yes. That's why we came with this program, so we can support these women with a microcredit, but not only with a microcredit. We are also strengthening their capability. Yes.
We have the-- we are lucky because we have a local culture that is one of the most richest culture in Brazil, Jequitinhonha Valley. Passing from generation to generation, they have their-- these skills. They just need the opportunity to improve it. That's why, like I said before, everything we do, we do looking to the fragilities and also the opportunities of the territory. This is, in my point of view, in our point of view, we have much more opportunities than fragility with the local culture with these women and also in partnership with the local government. We have just the last numbers, we have already 2,000 women with us in the Dona de Mim Programa, this microcredit program.
But we have the opportunity to increase it and to reach 10,000 women in the territory. Next one, please. This is another social program. They are small water basins, yes?
Yes.
It's to support the farmer, the small farmers in the region, and also for the agriculture process, and also for the animals. Just to give you an idea, I brought few numbers here. The small basins of water we have already implemented 1,400, and we are going to implement another 700. Yes? Thank you.
Uh, yeah-
Would you like to say something, Maria, please?
Because this kind of structure talks with social program and environmental program, too.
Yes.
Because this kind of a structure can contribute to the aquifer.
Yes.
So both environmental-
And social
... and social.
Yes.
A sustainable agriculture.
Exactly. Thank you.
And it goes back to the number of people impacted.
Oh
... because each structure has, you know, they can't work the structure, either with, we call animal-based, meaning cattling, and goat raising, and what have you, or agricultural. Each structure basically needs to be worked by the small-scale farmer, the subsistence-
Mm
... agricultural, individual with, help. So we believe that each structure needs five people working on it for full benefit.
Exactly.
There's 7,000 people benefiting from it today already.
Exactly.
Which just shows, you know, how much benefit does this create, right?
Exactly. Thank you, Ana. Well, on the other hand, we have implemented the. We have distributed already, not only distributed, but implemented together with, in a partnership with the local government, we have already implemented 1,000 water tanks. They have already been delivered, and we bring potable water for these families every month. Yes, we are responsible for this distribution in partnership with the local government. Just to be one point that is very important, it's about, it's helping people, you know, to avoid disease.
Yeah.
The numbers that we have from the Ministry of Health in 2023 showed that 20% of death in Itinga was related to infections and parasitic disease, and in Araçuaí, 25.28%. So we are supporting them to have a better situation in terms of health and less death. Like, Ana said before, so we never ended to distribute food baskets. We started it in the pandemic time, and now we continue distributing. It's very important because it goes to the schools, it goes to elderly people, and it supports, like, more than 36,000 people. Yes, every month, we distribute food baskets for the communities. Not only our neighbors, but also in the city of Itinga and Araçuaí. Our homecoming program. So, we have 85% of our workforce, they are local.
Yes, and 98% of our employees lives, live in Araçuaí-
That's right
... and Itinga, which helps improve income and job generation. Yes, and at the same time, to improve the local economy. So we created more than 1,500 jobs, but I would like just to... We have one person here, Cassiane. She's our manager, and she was working outside Araçuaí. She's from Araçuaí, and she was working outside Araçuaí because she didn't have any opportunity, any job opportunity in her city. After Sigma, she could come back, yes, and now she's living near her parents and also friends, and she's contributing to her place, yes, to her region. Yes, Cassiane? This is another pillar of our social investment strategy: invest in education. We have already near 300 children being supported by this project, the education project. This is just one picture from Nunu Mut educational complex.
We also are bringing to them extra classes, such as patrimonial education, environmental education, culture, local culture, dancing, theater, photography. So they go to their school. They should stay there in the afternoon, but in the morning we stay with them, together with the local government. Yes, of course, we are supported by them. We are supporting them to improve. So in the morning time, we stay with these children, so their parents can work. Most of them are our employees, yes, and from our neighbors' communities also. And we have already three schools. No, we are going to have the event-
Yeah.
Yes
... in two weeks.
In two-
Yes, in two weeks.
Okay.
Yes, to inaugurate another two schools, one in Itinga and another one in Araçuaí. Please, Ana. Here, just some examples about what Ana and Keith said, yes, about paving the roads with the stones that they showed here before. Everything that we are doing in terms of improving the roads that goes to the communities, yes, because before of it, it couldn't rain in Araçuaí and Itinga. And now we are facilitating their access to social equipment, such as medical hospitals, schools. So they take less time to go to the hospitals, to schools, because they have better roads. Talking about. Like I said before, so anything we do, we do together, listening to the communities and together with them.
So we have permanent meetings with the communities, some of them every week, some of them every 15 days, and some of them monthly, so we decided together how it was going to be, yes? Not only who is going to be invited, but also the periodicity, the kind of dialogue channels we were going to use with them, and we mapped together all the themes that are important for them, and also important for Sigma, of course, so we discuss together everything, and we bring solutions, and we find solutions together. Okay, Ana. Just showing you a few pictures about our social dialogue meetings, and can you just the previous slide.
There and there, you can see why we were commemorating, because we decided, they approved the kind of proposal for the school, and that's why we have these pictures here.
Yeah.
Another one, please. Yeah.
Sorry, sorry.
No, next, please. Next. They are. Here, we are discussing. I was there. Yeah, here we are discussing about the extra classes, what they wanted us to bring, and what their children would like to do together with us and together with the municipality. Same. Ah, here, this picture is very important, because you see there, our Marcelo, our operational director.
In the center, Marcelo.
Yes, and beside him, you can see Paulo.
From mining operation.
Paulo is our senior manager, environmental senior manager.
Environment, yeah.
So, every meeting that we have with the community, we come together. We bring them together, so any complaint, any manifestation, they will be there to explain or to try to find any solutions together.
Uh, huh.
Also, we call this program Coffee and Conversation, because we have a team, a special team, yes, specialists in social dialogue, community relations, and human rights, and they visit the communities individually. They visit the communities every day, sometimes to drink a coffee together, and sometimes to talk about what they are thinking, which are their expectations, and also to engage with them. Ah, yeah. We have another two activities to dialogue with communities. This one here, we invite the teenagers from the communities, and we discuss together about dreams. They can dream. They can be anything they want to be. Yes, and they love it. They love it. Every month.
Yeah
... we do this kind of activity, and the other one? Yeah, it's the same.
The same.
Yes, and,
So that's kind of the wrap, right? So-
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is us talking, right? Which shows that, as we highlighted here, we could go on and on all afternoon.
Yeah.
We could have a whole session on ESG here, basically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and what we wanna say is that we started this in 2019, when we had just finished feasibility, and we were selected by what was then a very obscure gathering called Climate Conference COP. I had to justify to people where I was going... 'cause people didn't know what COP was. Again, this is 2019.
Mm-hmm
... where we were selected, as an example, as a case study on mitigating the impact of resource extraction, and we show leadership and responsible mining. We had our pilot plant running. We had all these circuits we talked about, with Keith in commercial scale already running in the pilot plant. It was December 2019. I took time off to go to Madrid. A lot of people thought I was going vacation, shopping, what have you. So I literally had to take time off to sit at COP for three days, and I just went on the weekend to the World Climate Assembly, where I'm actually keynoting now-
Mm-hmm
... five years later, which is-
Mm
... makes me very proud to talk about our first initiative. This was then. Every year thereafter, the following year was a pandemic, then there was a skip, Glasgow 2021, Egypt 2022, then last year in Dubai, and now in Azerbaijan, we've been featured at every COP as a case study. Again, we're always bringing initiatives that seem ambitious at the time, but we constantly deliver. For example, in Glasgow, we talked about recycling everything, that there will be zero waste, and people looked at us like ... "Really?" Well, 'cause what we said, "Well, as we'd done dry stacking-
Yeah
... we're now gonna take this waste, and we're gonna remove it," right?
Yes.
So and we did that for a while. In fact, there was a market for the waste, and as the markets went down, we didn't give up. So we're now gonna recycle the waste, reprocess it, reuse it-
Mm
... so that we're zero waste. So we're always kinda-
Just three years before.
Just three years before.
Mm.
We're just kinda constantly pushing the envelope-
Yes
... on delivering this, which makes us very, very proud because it's work that we always do. In other words, we became now a thought leader. That was actually my waste presentation, Beyond Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, and here we are, right, with it. And we've done this since the pilot plant, so we're very proud because this is what we worked for so hard. I mean, again, Marcelo, A10, we're an impact fund. This is why we invested in this industry years ago, in order to demonstrate that all of these achievements were possible, marrying profitability, returns to shareholders, and delivering a benefit, basically lifting the community and leaving a legacy behind. So with that, I close.
And now-
Yeah
... now we are a member of the Global Compact.
Yes, we are members of the Global Compact.
Global
... United Nations Pact-
Mm
... for the global well-being, right? So Pact for Humanity, we're proud members. So again, with that, I close, and I wanna thank you for listening. It's been a very eventful day. We shared quite a lot with you, and we are very grateful to count on your trust and to count on you as shareholders. So thank you.
Thank you.
Look forward to another year of execution, right?