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00:00:00 - 00:00:47

Lance Mortlock

Welcome to the next episode of the Energy Drivers podcast. I'm Lance Mortlock and I'm your host for today's discussion with Amanda Hall, the Chief Executive Officer and founder at Summit Nanotech, which is a cleantech organization setting new standards for lithium extraction. Throughout our series, we invite Canadian energy and mining leaders to discuss key issues, provide insights and ask challenging questions. In previous episodes, we've highlighted the importance of critical minerals in the energy transition, so we decided to further explore this subject by discussing lithium mining opportunities in Canada. Amanda, we're glad to have you on the show. Welcome!

00:00:47 - 00:00:50

Amanda Hall

Thank you, Lance, glad to be here.

00:00:50 - 00:01:02

Lance Mortlock

Let's begin this episode with a small introduction. Can you please maybe share a little bit about your story and describe to our listeners the core of what Summit Nanotech is all about?

00:01:02 - 00:02:59

Amanda Hall

Yes. So, I came from the oil and gas sector in Alberta. I spent a lot of years as a geophysicist, drilling oil wells, drilling for gas, fracking, heavy oil production, oil sands production, all of the things that you do to get that type of resource out to the world, to produce energy because everyone in the world needs energy. I did that for about 13 years and then went on a holiday one Christmas, because my ex-husband had our kids in Hawaii, and I was all by myself. Don't feel sad for me, though, because I had a great adventure. I went to Tibet, and I was climbing mountains in Tibet, and I was at the top of a mountain in a monastery and saw a monk pull a cell phone out of his robe. And it might have been the state of mind I was in at the time, but I kind of had a flash to what the future of energy looked like. And what really made sense to me was the world wants energy. The world doesn't want hydrocarbons necessarily. They want energy. And so, what does energy look like in the future? And so having had that moment of, you could call it an existential crisis or a, an epiphany. But regardless I came home to my job here in Calgary, Alberta and, really started thinking about the future of energy and how I wanted to be a part of it. So eventually I quit my job, sold my house as a single mom, and started a company that, rather than developing oil and gas resources, I began a process of understanding how to improve the technology needed to develop lithium resources, because I wanted to see more lithium being produced in a sustainable, efficient manner in order to feed into what I saw as being a big tidal wave of change coming in the energy sector.

00:02:59 - 00:03:30

Lance Mortlock

That's fascinating. That must have been, it's a big risk for you personally and professionally. How did you do that through the pandemic and the economic downturn? With all of that money that you put on the line, you sold your house and you were trying to build a business through some pretty tough periods. How was that?

00:03:30 - 00:05:59

Amanda Hall

It's challenging. Yeah, indeed. The risk was high, but I was willing to do it because I knew somebody had to do it. And when I looked around at different people in the industry and looked at the way mining was being done at that time, I realized that sometimes you just have to step in and take on that role yourself. And so, I knew I had the skill set to do it. I had the passion to do it. I didn't have a lot of money, but I put everything I owned into this company. And then I went after government grants. And that's the very first step for a startup company, is to just turn to your local peer group. So, I talked to a lot of other startup CEOs, found out how they survived at the beginning of starting a company, hooked myself into a lot of different grant opportunities and started to grow the business. I started raising capital through angel investors about a year in, and slowly built the company from there. The pandemic was hard because we were working at the government lab, the NRCan lab in Devon, Alberta. We were working there developing the technology. And when the pandemic hit, basically that government lab turned to us and said, get out and good luck. And that was it. So, we had to completely shut down everything we were doing in that laboratory. And I had not a lot of options at that point. We couldn't stop developing the technology. We would die. And so, I considered going Breaking Bad for a while and renting a van and having a lab in a van. Actually reached out to the University of Calgary, talk to Dr. Don Lawton and said, “can I rent that van from you?” But then at the end of the day we ended up landing in the middle of the country in Bearspaw, Alberta, in a laboratory that was attached to a barn. And the laboratory had previously been used to study cow embryos. So, we scrubbed it clean, as clean as we could, and set up our lab in this barn in the country. And we developed the technology there all the way to the point where we built our first pilot and shipped it from that barn in Bearspaw, Alberta, all the way down to Chile to execute our pilot.

00:05:59 - 00:06:18

Lance Mortlock

What an incredible story. Let's do a crash course, maybe Amanda, a little on lithium. Some of our audience might not be familiar with it. Can you just explain to our listeners how lithium is produced and what are the major applications of this critical mineral?

00:06:18 - 00:09:14

Amanda Hall

Yeah, lithium is, the entire planet is wrapped in a layer of rock called the lithosphere. And that is because the entire outer core of the Earth is lithium based. It has lithium in it. Basically, during the Big Bang, lithium came out of every volcano possible or, you know, it filled the whole space that the planet was coalescing and becoming a planet. It filled that outer layer with lithium, and now it comes out of volcanoes. And so, the closer you can get to a volcano, the higher the lithium concentration. And so that is why countries like Chile, in the Lithium Triangle, where the Andes mountains are, it's covered in volcanoes. That is why they call that the Lithium Triangle, because it has the highest-concentration lithium on the planet and it all has to do with the volcano range down there and how the lithium came out of those volcanoes and slowly settled into deposits called salars, which are basically saltwater lakes buried 400m or 400ft, sorry, below the surface of the earth. And they're very rich in lithium. So that is the easiest and fastest and cheapest way to get lithium out of the ground. We also have other types of deposits around the planet. Australia has more of a granite-based lithium deposit, where rocks in the lithosphere cooled slowly over a longer period of time. And so that deposit gets mined in a traditional way, strip mined. So, they have to use a ton of energy and heat and crush up the rock and dissolve it in acid and pull the lithium out in that manner. And in Canada, we have some interesting lithium deposits in Canada. We have hard rock over in Eastern Canada, in Québec and Ontario. So similar to Australia, there's hard rock lithium there that we can take advantage of hydroelectric power and get the lithium out of the rock in Eastern Canada. And then there's also a small amount of lithium in our produced brine from oil and gas. It’s much more challenging to get that out of the brine because there's not much there and it's mixed with oil. So, you have to pretreat it a fair bit before you can access the lithium. And even then there's not a lot of lithium that comes out of it. But it is there. It's a pretty sizable deposit too, but just in low concentration. And now they're discovering all sorts of lithium in clay deposits in the USA. So, it's like an unconventional lithium play when you get it out of clay. Nobody's ever done it before. But Lithium Americas is building their first facility to extract lithium from clay. And that's more of a sedimentary lithium deposit. So hopefully I didn't go too deep.

00:09:14 - 00:09:43

Lance Mortlock

Yeah, that's good, that's very helpful. I never realized how much lithium there is around the planet, so that's fascinating. How does Summit Nanotech’s lithium production process differ from maybe more traditional methods? Maybe you could double-click on that. I know you're focusing on sustainability and world-class technology to really differentiate lithium harvesting, so it'd be great for you to elaborate on that a little bit if you can.

00:09:43 - 00:13:03

Amanda Hall

Definitely. So, I learned so much in oil and gas about efficiency and minimal OpEx. Being a low-cost operator is really important in any commodity space. And so when I looked at the world's lithium reserves, I immediately zeroed in on the Lithium Triangle in Chile and Argentina. There's lithium in Bolivia as well, but the corruption in Bolivia prevents a lot of companies from being able to operate there. And so, Chile and Argentina became a focus point for me. By developing lithium in those countries, I knew that I could be a low-cost operator, one of the lowest-cost operators in the world, actually. And how that protects my company is because as the price of lithium climbs or sinks, all commodities have volatility in their price index, but I could skate underneath that if I'm a low-cost operator and never be impacted by the volatility of lithium price. So, I set my sights there. South American brine, it's got a beautiful impurity profile. it the impurities are much easier to remove in order to access the lithium, or the way our materials work is the impurities flow through our nanomaterials and the material themself pulls the lithium out of solution. And so that's why we sometimes use the word lithium harvesting because we're literally sieving lithium out of, out of salt water. Not with a membrane or anything, but with our proprietary sorbent materials. We pack those into a column and then we push brine through the column. Lithium gets stuck in our materials, everything else goes through. And then we put it back underground. And so, the way we do this is so much better than the traditional way of mining lithium from brine, because we double-yield, first of all, the large evaporation ponds that you'll see in South America today, they produce over 50% of the world's lithium. Their yield is less than 50% coming from those ponds. So, it's not a super, like that was to me the low-hanging fruit. How do you improve that process while you double-yield? That way you get everyone's attention. The government loves you because you're paying twice as many royalties. The mining companies love you because you're giving them twice as much value for every square foot that they own. And then communities love you because you're doing it sustainably and you're not impacting the land as harshly as you are with the old mining technology. So, hopefully that makes sense. One of the other things we really focused on is we developed the tech was water. Because I come from Canada, water is frozen in northern Canada, so having water through your process is always challenging. It's just as bad when you're in a desert in the top of a mountain range in South America. So, having a technology that uses less water means that the logistics are easier, the OpEx are easier, the communities aren't as impacted because you're not touching their drinking water. So, it just meant that we had a leg up on our competitors because of our strong focus on economics and water use.

00:13:03 - 00:13:22

Lance Mortlock

And I've heard water is a real challenge in Chile right now, for example, isn't it? From a farming and a broader perspective? So, if there's technology that you can use that involves less water, I would imagine that's going to be much more sustainable.

00:13:22 - 00:13:36

Amanda Hall

Yes. It's one of the first questions we get asked by customers. How much water do you use per tonne of lithium produced? And our number is traditionally, from what I've seen, ours is the lowest in industry and we've put a lot of effort into that.

00:13:36 - 00:13:55

Lance Mortlock

So, Amanda, that's probably a good segue into sort of my next question, which is how does Summit Nanotech envisage its technology really impacting the lithium market and supporting the energy transition more broadly? Can this approach truly be widely adopted by other producers around the world?

00:13:55 - 00:15:20

Amanda Hall

Yes. And it's not even can it be, it's that it must be. Because we have got a situation now where governments are imposing upon mining companies to stop mining the old way, and instead to use DLE, direct lithium extraction, which is what Summit does. So having a government pushing for your technology really helps because traditional mining methods aren't allowed anymore in Chile. You're not allowed to build evaporation ponds anymore. So, any new project coming online in Chile has to have DLE. So that really helps us. In Argentina, it's not enforced yet by the government, but local communities are starting to protest regular evaporation pond processes. There was a river in Hombre Muerto that recently dried up, and they shut in the entire region's operations because this river disappeared and it scared the local communities, and it scared the government about how are these mining operations, actually, how are they interacting with the subsurface and interacting with the ecosystem around them? And so, they paused all operations and started digging into ecological impact of mining. So even in Argentina, it's starting to become a very monitored aspect of mining.

00:15:20 - 00:15:42

Lance Mortlock

So, in some way it's going to naturally occur anyway because of the warming and the drying out that we're seeing in some regions of the world, that moving to this new technology, that Summit Nanotech is promoting and piloting is going to naturally occur, and you'll be well positioned.

00:15:42 - 00:15:47

Amanda Hall

I believe so, yes. My goal is total global domination.

00:15:47 - 00:16:14

Lance Mortlock

Ha ha ha! I love it, I love it. Alex, maybe you could just check. I think I'm right in saying that lithium market trends, when you look at those and the developments, on the one hand, we've witnessed significant lithium price decline since 2022, but we're also seeing additional financial pressure on suppliers. Is that right, Alex, from the data that you see?

00:16:14 - 00:16:45

Alexandr Kim

Yes. If we take a look at online search items, that’s a clear narrative from the many industry stakeholders. For example, I am now looking at S&P Global Market Intelligence and they have argued that the world is in the lithium supplier race and lithium is in high demand, but they have also acknowledged the impact of price drops and producers, leading to infrastructure delays and lithium shortages. So, it is probably fair to say that there is a lot of market uncertainty.

00:16:45 - 00:17:09

Lance Mortlock

Amanda, when you think about price declines and price fluctuations to Alex's point, and then electrification, we know, continues to be top of mind for decarbonization pathways. You know that market outlook is unclear. So, what do you think the future of lithium mining around the world is going to be?

00:17:09 - 00:19:47

Amanda Hall

I still see a very positive outlook for lithium. It is the key element in any lithium-ion battery, whether you're using that battery for electric vehicles, electronics or even stationary storage. There are other options for stationary storage, like, like iron-based batteries or water-based batteries. But having spoken to a lot of solar development project owners, their indications to me was that the reliability of lithium-ion batteries is the most important aspect of choosing a battery to put in the field, even for solar or wind development. So, renewable energy. So, I think the demand for lithium is going to be around for a very long time. What's really fascinating about this price volleyball bouncing around is that when I started Summit back in 2018, the price of lithium was $6,000 a tonne. It then shot up to $80,000 a tonne, and then came back down in 2022 to $14,000 a ton. So from my original position, the price has tripled. So, I'm super happy with where it's landed today. And I know from an economics perspective, I have great margins with all of my operations in South America, even with the $14,000 lithium price today. So I don't see this as a negative thing. I think that the big giant leap up to $80,000 a tonne was, it was just a bubble that no one really believed would stick around. But unfortunately, a lot of projects that are more in the unconventional space for lithium have high operation costs. And so they may have used those high lithium prices to validate their business models. Not super wise, given that the decline down to more of a $14 to $20,000 range was, I think, inevitable. But there are projects that are out there globally that have OpEx prices well above $14 a kilogram or $14,000 a tonne. And so those projects will not go forward unless the price of lithium climbs back up. But projects like we have in South America that are closer to, our levelized cost of lithium, including a 20% amortized return on CapEx. No one else that I know of in USA or Canada can do that. So they're going to have to wait for lithium prices to climb back up. Whereas I can keep going, I can keep developing.

00:19:47 - 00:20:27

Lance Mortlock

When you look at electric vehicles, lithium is an important, as you point out, component of mineral, or critical mineral in battery manufacturing. And by extension, the production of electric vehicles. Do you think EV adoption rates will be as fast as some organizations predict, or do you think it's going to slow? I mean, we're already seeing, Amanda, certain manufacturing companies go, you know, we're not so sure about this and certain lines of EV cars that they were going to produce, they're not going to produce. They're slowing down production rates. Does that keep you up at night?

00:20:27 - 00:22:29

Amanda Hall

No, because year over year it's still increasing. It's still, that yeah, the adoption of electric vehicles is still growing. It's not growing at the same pace that everyone thought it would, but that's fine. I just bought my first Tesla this year, and I am very cheap. I am not a person that spends a lot of money. Yet for me, it was when I did my cost comparison with all the other vehicles on the market, both ICE vehicles and electric vehicles, to me, buying a Tesla made common sense. It was going to keep my costs down. It was, it was an economic decision. So as companies like Tesla move their production line into making more and more inexpensive EVs, and I know BYD is coming out with a $20,000 EV, the more we see that, the more people will adopt and buy, because it just makes common sense. Where I do worry is that the infrastructure won't keep up because we need somewhere to charge all these EVs. We need renewable energy to power the charging stations, because, it’s funny, my boyfriend always teases me that he drove past EV charging station somewhere overseas. I can't remember where he was, Abu Dhabi or something. And there was two diesel generators powering an EV charging station. And just the irony behind that, that we're burning diesel to power an EV, just it's almost comical. But, you know, statistics show that even if you were burning coal to power EVs, it's better than burning hydrocarbons in a vehicle. So there's, clear indicators that driving EVs makes sense from an ESG perspective, from a climate change perspective. But as the costs come down, it will become an economic decision for the common person. EVs will no longer be for the rich. They'll be for the everyday people.

00:22:29 - 00:24:07

Lance Mortlock

It's interesting, the listeners to our show know this about me already, Amanda, but that you probably don't. I put up quite a large nine-kilowatt solar system on my roof, and I did that in anticipation of, buying buying an EV because I felt that from a power grid perspective, it made no sense, you know, several years ago where we still had a proportion of power generation in Alberta that was coal and gas to power my EV, on nonrenewable hydrocarbon energy. So put the solar system on the roof. And by the EV, I haven't bought the EV yet because I have range anxiety when we try and get to the mountains down in Fernie, BC, it can get pretty cold on that road and you lose 20%, 25% of battery efficiency. But the technology is getting better and better. So, I might be asking you for some advice very soon. Good segue into my next question. Amanda. From my knowledge, Canada holds roughly, and I think, Alex, you came up with this figure, 3.6% of the global lithium reserves. And that's a blip on the radar compared to, say, Australia, the Lithium Triangle of Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. How significant is our role in Canada in the global lithium market? Are we players or not?

00:24:07 - 00:26:16

Amanda Hall

I think we're definitely players. I overheard some Silicon Valley investors at a conference complaining about how Canada was competing against the USA to capture the battery manufacturing market and position it in Eastern Canada, in Ontario and Québec, because they thought that it should be in the USA. And how dare the Canadian Prime Minister give subsidies that match their blessed IRA subsidies? So, you know, I've, I've even thanked [federal Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe] Champagne personally for doing that. He's not only developing us as a country that is the owner of a lot of significant critical metals and minerals and resources that go into batteries, but he's also putting battery manufacturing in our country, which is a great thing to do, because now we're integrating ourselves into the value chain, not only from the where the shovel hits the ground, but all the way to where the battery goes into the EV. And someday, I'm hoping that vehicle manufacturing in Eastern Canada will start to include EV manufacturing as well. And then the whole, vertical value chain can be housed in Canada. I think what's really important to understand, though, is that, not unlike the way oil and gas works, just because we produce oil in Alberta doesn't mean Ontario is going to buy it if they can get it cheaper from somewhere else. And so what I've often said to Champagne and other ministers in the government is just because we have lithium assets in Canada doesn't mean we shouldn't be importing it from South America where it's cheaper. So I think understanding that Canadians need to guard ourselves from patriotism or having too much national pride and instead be logical about how we are accessing resources globally. Having a relationship with Chile with a free trade agreement gives us a huge advantage, because we can import lithium from Chile for a fraction of the cost that it would take to produce lithium in Canada.

00:26:16 - 00:26:56

Lance Mortlock

And so, explain, just to interject there, Amanda, explain that to me. My logic and correct me if I'm wrong, I mean, you're deep into this. But if we've got considerable reserves in Canada, surely, we should be developing those reserves, those mines in Canada, to feed those plants and those manufacturing facilities that we're building in Ontario, because that creates jobs. It creates diversification. It integrates the value chain. Why would we import even though it's cheaper, from Chile? Like what's the thought behind that?

00:26:56 - 00:28:21

Amanda Hall

No. And I 100% agree with you. And the more we innovate and evolve the technology to extract better and cheaper in Canada, the better position will be to be feeding our own Canadian lithium into those battery manufacturing plants. However, in the short term, we don't have that ability yet. But not unlike the oil, what do you call the shale gas? Shale gas? Yeah, not unlike shale gas. We knew the shale gas was there. We knew we needed to get it out of the ground. But it took decades to develop the technology to get it right and to get it out of the ground economically. So, I could see it taking some time to be able to get lithium out of Alberta's produced brine economically. And that's something that I'm planning to do as my phase two with Summit Nanotech. Phase one is make as much money as I can to be a healthy, thriving company by pulling lithium out of the ground in South America. Phase two is take everything we learned and the technology that we've commercialized on the backs of the existing producers, or not on their backs, but with the assistance of existing producers, and bring that technology back to Canada to have it adapt into the brine space in Canada. So for me, that's phase two. Phase one is get as much cheap lithium onto the market as possible.

00:28:21 - 00:28:52

Lance Mortlock

Pulling on a bit of the thread that you just mentioned after the lithium prices drop, which we talked about, some Canadian producers really struggled to remain afloat from a lithium perspective. For example, Nemaska Lithium was acquired by the Government of Québec to avoid bankruptcy. Given this. Amanda, what can we do as a country or an industry to support Canadian lithium miners in becoming sustainable and successful in the future?

00:28:52 - 00:30:35

Amanda Hall

I think, I've seen actually the producers of the new mine. I don't think it's called Nemaska Lithium anymore. I think they changed the name, but, maybe not. I could be wrong, but I think what they're doing is they're reaching out to Australia for assistance in setting up their mine, because Australia has been doing this forever, and we have a lot to learn from, from producers who have done this well in other parts of the world. So again, I would say just, removing our national pride from our tool belt and instead looking for ways to leverage the learnings and technologies of mining operations that go on all over the planet. You know, Sigma Lithium just set up this beautiful new hardrock mine in Brazil, and they're killing it. They're already in operation. And we have a lot to learn from that. So I think Canada needs to humbly go out and look for the right technology, the right flowsheet, the right way to do lithium mining well, and then and then try to implement that in Canada. I'm not a big advocate of using tax dollars to get a business off the ground. You know, we relied on government grants in the early stages, but you need a business model that can stand on its own two feet. So if mining operations in Canada can't survive without tax subsidies or, sorry, without government subsidies, that's probably not a good position to be in. But once we get an economic mine set up and running, it should be something that feeds into Canada's GDP and Canada's economy, not take away from it, if that makes sense.

00:30:35 - 00:30:43

Lance Mortlock

Absolutely. It does. It does. Does the regulatory process in this country around new mines, does it worry you that it's too slow?

00:30:43 - 00:31:39

Amanda Hall

Oh, yeah. For sure. Yeah. I had a conversation with the Chief Development Officer from Allkem back before they merged with Livent to become Arcadium. Anyway, chatting with him, he was extremely frustrated by the permitting requirements for James Bay. And although I'm a huge advocate of community relations and environmental impact assessments and making sure that everything's done well, that is not what is holding up these operations anymore. It's just a whole whack of red tape. And boy, do we need to cut through that faster. So, every country has this problem. But I think Canada, given our resource extraction legacy that we have, we should be able to move these projects along faster by still observing our community commitments and our environmental commitments. But move faster.

00:31:39 - 00:32:18

Lance Mortlock

And Amanda, it's one of the things that I've been talking about for several years now, with a number of different energy and mining leaders, that the regulatory system in this country is broken. It's too slow. It stops us from being competitive. And if I think about, you know, the mission that I'm on in terms of having important conversations with leaders like you, you know, that if we're going to transition at the speed that we need to transition, we need a regulatory system that supports that. And that requires transformation in that space.

00:32:18 - 00:32:23

Amanda Hall

Yeah, I would agree, I would agree we need speed. Speed is so important.

00:32:23 - 00:32:36

Lance Mortlock

So, knowing that Canada still has an abundance of opportunities with critical minerals, what excites you most in the near term and in the long term with lithium?

00:32:36 - 00:33:57

Amanda Hall

Just the innovation around everything that's, everything around this beautiful element. Lithium is the lightest, most energy-dense element on the planet. So it can carry more energy than any other molecule in existence. So unless an alien drops a foreign material on the planet, this is it. This is the one that we need to move forward with. But the ability to innovate around that lithium molecule is just, there's so much potential there. And I love seeing universities getting involved. I love seeing incubators taking on young entrepreneurs and helping them get on their feet. The more we can do to support innovation and tech development in this country, the better position we’ll be to futureproof, not just Alberta, because we're resource extraction experts out here, but the whole country should be involved in innovation. Data and, you know, AI is a bit of a buzz word right now, but using data wisely, that's all AI is, really. That is an area where we can incredibly unlock potential by incorporating more data into how we operate, how we even use energy on the planet and in this country. So yeah, I would say there's loads and loads to do still. Lots of hard work to do still.

00:33:57 - 00:34:10

Lance Mortlock

There's always complex problems to solve. Maybe a last question is, as we conclude here, is there anything that I should have asked that I didn't ask that you want to get off your chest?

00:34:10 - 00:35:26

Amanda Hall

You know, I wouldn't be, what's the right word for this? I would be remiss if I didn't say that as I build Summit Nanotech, and as I have built Summit Nanotech over the years, the importance of diversity in companies and even in field operations has been, forefront in all of my decision making. My board of directors is fully equal, half women, half men. My executive team is half women, half men. I think it's incredibly important as we build new businesses and new companies in this country to continue to support that endeavor of equality and equity, and get as much diversity as possible into all of our businesses and onto our teams and into our boardrooms. And, you know, often I've heard diversity is not skin deep. It comes with experience and life and having wisdom from different orientations and different background stories. It makes for much better decision-making when you have diversity in boardrooms. So that's just something I would put a little plug in there for that. I wouldn't be where I am today without that mindset of having wise, diverse thinking at all levels of our company.

00:35:26 - 00:36:25

Lance Mortlock

I couldn't agree more. In fact, we, I just wrote an article with a colleague of mine here at EY, on the dynamic duo between diversity and innovation and how diversity, whatever source of diversity you want to focus on, does drive more innovative thinking. And I couldn't think of more a more innovative company than Summit Nanotech and the technology that you're trying to develop and how important diversity is to that innovative thinking that you're trying to bring to the table. So congratulations on that. And thank you for your time and insights, Amanda, on the show. It was a pleasure talking to you about Summit Nanotech, the lithium opportunities in Canada and more broadly. And for our listeners, if you have any questions or queries, you can reach out to EY via the attached contact details. So, thank you, Amanda.

00:36:25 - 00:36:27

Amanda Hall

Thank you. It's a pleasure talking to you.

00:36:27 - 00:38:00

Lance Mortlock

Finishing another great conversation and episode. I'd like to share of maybe a few, kind of final thoughts as I think about Amanda's comments today. One, lithium is a vital mineral for the energy transition. Clean energy solutions, electric vehicles and energy storage systems are just a few of the product categories that absolutely need this critical mineral. Number two, although uncertain, the future of lithium is bright. Lithium producers may still be navigating through commodity pricing, infrastructure, and labour challenges, some of which we talked today with Amanda about. However, continued global increase in demand for electrification will present plenty of industry opportunities. And finally, Canada has, I think, a bigger role on the international stage to play. Although our reserves aren't as large as Australia or the Lithium Triangle’s, we have several opportunities to grow this sector. Canada can harvest and process lithium. Our downstream applications can be more diverse, for instance in battery manufacturing. All in all, this is an important economic sector for Canada which can further contribute to more value to our country. So once again, thank you for joining our podcast, Amanda, and we'll see you all at the next episode.