Metallium Limited (MTM) Earnings Call Transcript

Good afternoon, or morning, everyone, depending on where you are, and welcome to Metallium's August 2026 Investor Update and Webinar. My name is David Tasker, and I'll be hosting today's session with Metallium Managing Director and CEO, Michael Walshe. Thank you for joining us. It's been a particularly active period for Metallium with the release of the company's June quarterly report and today the announcement of its first commercial technology services agreement for the Flash Joule Heating platform. Michael will shortly take us through the presentation, which will cover the progress made in derisking the core FJH platform. commissioning and commercializing activities at Gator Point, the company's strategy for processing electronic waste, the new agreement with Environmental Clean Technologies and the key milestones ahead. Before we begin, a quick reminder that today's presentation contains forward-looking statements and should be considered together with the disclaimer on Slide 2. Noting nothing discussed today constitutes financial advice and investors should make their own assessment of the company and its announcements. The presentation will be followed by a live Q&A session. Please submit your questions through the Q&A function at any time and we will get through as many questions as we possibly can in the time allocated. So Michael, there's a great deal to discuss. I will now hand over to you to begin the presentation, and thanks for your time.

Thanks, David, and good morning, good evening, or good night to all viewers. Today, I'll go through our recent quarterly reports and also try to explain today the recently announced deal that we've just done with ECT. Next slide, please, David. And again. So yes, the quarter it's been a really busy quarter for us, and we've hit a lot of milestones. We've really had our heads down focused on the technology development and commissioning and also progressing the several commercial opportunities that we have in the pipeline, including with Indium, one of our main clients regarding gallium, Environmental Clean Technologies deal was just announced today as our first processing as a service opportunity. I'll get to that a bit later. And really the articulation of how we see the printed circuit board opportunity going forward and what we're doing in terms of preprocessing. So I'll try to explain that a bit better. in the coming slides. Yes, it's been a very busy quarter. We've had our key focus on the commissioning of the technology. And maybe we haven't been putting out as many announcements as we have had previously in the past, but really that's because the key focus was on driving the technology towards scale-up and commercialization. And there's a huge development that we've achieved during the quarter in terms of commission and success, also several opportunities, not just on the electronic scrap side of the business, but also across opportunities like catalytic converters, rare road elements, germanium, residues. So I'll get to all that quite shortly. But yes, it's been a really exciting quarter for us. And look, it's very tough capital markets out there, conditions right now. And really, we're in a very fortunate position to have a very healthy cash balance right now so we can ignore what's going on in the macro environment and just focus on driving this company towards commercialization. Next slide, please, David. So yes, the key achievements for the quarter really were around the Flash Joule Heating technology, which is obviously our core piece of IP within our portfolio. And I'll articulate soon that we are not just going to be a Flash Joule Heating technology company, we're in the process of patenting what we're doing in the preprocessing. And effectively, we will have multiple technologies within the portfolio. So really, the key outcomes of the quarter where we've over 100 tests flash campaigns across several different feedstocks, including electronic waste. And we -- I will be putting out a comprehensive testing update in the next week or 2 to explain what we've been doing on other feedstocks like catalytic converters, which is platinum group metal, palladium, rhodium rich scrap that's come from end-of-life catalytic converters, which is another very exciting feedstock, super high value and similar in terms of value compared to gold-rich printed circuit boards. So a lot of successful testing done, and we've really learned a huge amount about the technology and how we will eventually scale this to true industrial scale. We've also completed a very important milestone for us, which is the successful 12-hour continuous run using multiple reactors. And that's a key important point for us because really for our semi batch reactor, which we're calling Rev 1 of our technology and Rev 2 is the more truly bigger unit, fully continuous model that we will be prototyping towards the end of the year and early next year. But really the semi-batch unit is what's being selected for high-value scrap like electronic waste, gallium, germanium, residues and also more recently, catalytic converters. So really, that 12-hour continuous around using multiple reactors effectively showed us or demonstrated to us our scale-up strategy using multiple units is successful. And the next phase of this will be repeating that test using chlorine. And we've had a slight delay in terms of our ability to use chlorine for the bigger reactor, the current commercial size unit. And that's because of issues we're having with our main reactor building Area 140, I'll show a diagram of what that means shortly. But really, the delay is hopefully going to be resolved in the next couple of weeks and ideally 2 weeks' time. And it's all about proximity to the nearest neighbor, which is our landfill and I'll show a diagram of this shortly. So we will be repeating that multi-unit test using 3 reactors using chlorine, which is what we use for metal recovery, and that's imminent, hopefully, all pending this TCEQ, which is the EPA of Texas. And I will divulge more details on that shortly. So really, overall, from a technical point of view, it's been a very successful quarter, got the 3 units running of the commercial size unit, which is -- it's 400,000x bigger than the original Rice University experiments. So it's an incredible journey in terms of scale-up in pretty much less than 2 years, which is almost unheard of for a technology -- processing technology like what we're doing. And what remains now, as I said, is this multi reactor. So 3 units of the bigger size model using chlorine, and that's where we will be getting metal recovery from the different feedstocks. And the upcoming additional targets going forward will be the high recoveries from these said feedstocks, articulating more on what it means for us going forward in terms of how we will commercialize printed circuit boards as our first primary target. And then there are several other opportunities like rare earth elements, gallium, germanium, catalytic converters and more recently, ECT. So we will be explaining more of the business model going forward in the coming weeks as we can substantiate more of these commercial arrangements. Next slide, please, David. So just to explain what I mean by preprocessing. So here's a selection of photos of what a typical batch of feedstock that we've been receiving on printed circuit board. And as you can see, they're highly variable in terms of their composition and type. So even within a single batch from a given supplier, there's going to be a high degree of variability and there's also going to be stuff in there that's not printed circuit board, which, it's a recycling operation. That's just what happens in recycling. And we are now putting in major efforts and engineering smart as to how can we reduce that variability so that we have a known quantum or a much more known quantum that's going to be feeding our reactor and also, there's opportunities to pull out metals before they actually get to our reactor because, for example, if there's native copper or native gold doesn't make any sense for us to put that through a reactor and make it into a metal chlorides. So we're putting in efforts now as to how can we reduce that variability so that we can take feedstock from any supplier. And it can have stuff in there that shouldn't be there, and we will be able to deal with that, and we're ideally going to be able to patent what we're doing so that our portfolio of technology is increased. So we don't want to -- we're not just a Flash Joule Heating company. We will have a patented process for dealing with the variability of printed circuit boards. And overall, we're having a much stronger protection on the technology. Next slide, please, David. So just to try and explain this with a simple diagram. You can see on the left-hand side, a diagram of what a typical and typical really doesn't really explain the high degree of variability between brands, between products, between different suppliers. But this is just a simple diagram just to touch to show where does gold reside in a typical board and it's in several locations. And this can really, really highly vary depending on the source of the Board and also the year that it was manufactured. And then within a Board, there's also several subcomponents that are metal rich, and we're now putting efforts underway to see how can we take some of these metals and some of these components and separate them into discrete piles of feedstock so that we have a much more known quantum at the back end. And the overall message here is that PCBs are quite complex. But I think with these efforts that we're now putting in on pre-processing, we should have a very bulletproof solution to be able to deal with any supplier, any age of Board and also going forward, any future boards that come on to the market. And it is varying quite a lot because of the artificial intelligence revolution and also data center technology, the boards are changing at quite a rapid pace. What we're doing now will hopefully allow us to be able to process both -- all, previous, current and future types of PCB feedstocks. Next slide, please, David. And preprocessing for us means beneficiating different parts of the board into different streams so that the actual amount that's going to our flash reactor will be much less than we originally anticipated. And ideally, we'll be putting out native copper, even tin upfront before anything gets heated in our flash reactor. And here's just a simple diagram of some simple dry mechanical separation equipment. And we're not saying that we're going to reinvent that we're going to use known and proven pieces of equipment and unit operations and put them together in a unique way that we can hopefully patent. So we're effectively using proven pieces of equipment to achieve this preprocessing gain. And the overall reason why we're doing this, it should give us much higher returns on capital and improved resource utilization. So we want to be able to use the plastic, take all the plastic out of the board and not just burn it or get rid of it, just -- we can actually potentially sell that as a product. And the overall -- ESG benefit of this will be quite significant. And why is that important? Well, some of the people who were dealing with right now include the big hyperscalers and big -- basically the big AI companies, and they're very focused on the ESG aspects of recyclability of materials and resource utilization. So next slide, please. And here's just a selection of images from some of the preprocessing work that we've done. And you can see we can get a nice clean fraction of the different metal streams from some very simple type of unit operations. And we will publish a more formal update on this in the coming weeks, but it's -- we've had really good results so far. Next slide, please. And then Gator Point, which is obviously our key industrial site and where we're spending most of our efforts right now and the image on the bottom of the screen here shows the main reactor building, which is -- has had its roof repaired. And as people would be aware, we acquired this site probably just over a year ago. And the amount of activity that we've undertaken in that 12-month period has been very, very substantial. But it was a formally active hazardous waste incinerator. So it was an older site. And it came with a lot of the benefits of having a lot of concrete already poured, had a permit already in place for handling waste, including hazardous waste, which is very attractive to us. But it does come at the downside of having some of the buildings are a bit older than having a new building. So when the civil engineers assessed the roof on that main building Area 140 in our terminology, they condemn the roof, so we've had to replace it. And as a result, our chlorination activities have had to move to those back 3 sheds that are shown on the left-hand side of the bottom diagram and as a result, our original permit has had to be altered. And therefore, we are now waiting on a response for having our chlorination activities take place in those back buildings and the reason that there is an issue is that our neighbor is a landfill and they are very -- they're a friend of ours. They've agreed in writing that we can actually process using chlorine in those back buildings. And now we're just waiting on the TCEQ, which is like the environmental protection agency of Texas, for those guys to ratify that in writing to us. So we're expecting a favorable response in the coming weeks. So it's a very minor delay in the overall scheme of things, but we are not fazed by this at all. And if we don't get a rapid response, we can quickly replicate or relocate our activities to a building that's the furthest away building on this diagram at the top of the bottom diagram and the proximity to the nearest receptors, which is the TCEQ -- or sorry, the landfills office, and that office remains mainly unmanned for most of the day. So that's why our neighbor, the landfill is unfazed. And it's all about proximity to the source of chlorine. So that's the reason for our temporary delay, but we do hope that this is resolved in the very near term. And we do have solutions if it isn't resolved in the near term. And really, the biggest achievements from the quarter really are we've now established our own lab at Gator Point, which should hopefully increase our turnaround of assay. Assay turnaround, anyone familiar with the mining industry here in Australia will be familiar that often when labs are busy, you can wait up to 6 weeks for assay turnaround and we're experiencing in some cases, similar types of time lines waiting on assays. So having the ability to do our own assays at site is going to rapidly increase our commissioning time line and frequency. So that lab is established. We're still waiting on some major pieces of equipment, including an ICP-MS machine and other bits of kit. But now that we have a physical footprint for the lab. We've got a new lab manager. So we're full steam ahead on our own ability to assay, which is a big achievement. And over the coming weeks, we will be continuing to progress Gator Point in terms of additional upgrades that we need to do to the electrical systems, also some drainage systems and effectively get this ready for commercial operations early next year. So lots of progress made during the quarter. And again, this is only a temporary delay regarding the chlorination activities for these bigger scale-up reactors. And we still have the ability, and we're still doing testing right now on reactors, on the smaller unit reactors in a different location, and that's why we've been able to do all this additional testing on rare earth elements, gallium, germanium, catalytic converters, et cetera. So none of our testing frequency or our true technology commission has been delayed at all. Next slide, please. And then just on the commissioning, yes, so I already spoke about the major milestone for us to have 3 of the larger scale units, the true commercial semi batch reactor that's shown on the right-hand side. We have 3 of those running for a continuous 12-hour period and that effectively validated several pieces of information for us, the mechanical integrity. The integrity of the internal lining of the vessel, the process control system, how we feed and discharge the solids, all of that was highly valuable information, and we will continue with this test as soon as we get the chlorination permit to proceed and targeting metal recoveries. So that will hopefully happen in the very near term. Next slide, please. And then this is just an aerial view of the site and just to show where the neighboring landfill is. And you can see that boundary line between those back 3 buildings where we're doing the testing currently and the neighboring landfill office. And that's -- the original permit had a certain minimum distance that you're allowed to have between the source, which is chlorine and the nearest receptor, which is that office. So that's the reason why we've had this temporary delay, but we will soon get that resolved. Next slide, please. But you can see the size of the facility, it's a true industrial size site. And we've also got that additional parcel of land that we can lease should and when we need it. So we've got some really interesting use cases that we're contemplating for the additional parcel of land to the right-hand side. Next slide, please. And then just to briefly mention about these additional testing successes that we've had during the quarter, and I will put out a proper ASX release on this in the next week or 2. But yes, we've continued to have really good success on rare earths, gallium, germanium, and Platinum Group Metals, which is the catalytic converters. And the most exciting one really from me from a personal point of view is the rare earth elements. We treated raw rare earth ore literally ore that's had no beneficiation. It's just been dug out of the ground and crushed, we've managed to upgrade that significantly into an almost pure rare earth -- mixed rare earth chloride solution. So that's a really exciting opportunity for us. The ability to treat rare earth ore is truly breakthrough in a mineral processing sense. And I think the rare earth elements, in particular, is going to be, I think, one of the most lucrative opportunities for this technology. We've now shown that it's got applicability for raw ores, for rare earth tailings, for rare earth concentrates and even for intermediate products, this mixed rare earth carbonate that we've tested from Meteoric Resources. And also in the past, it's successfully recovered rare earth out of magnets scrap. So I think rare earth elements is a really exciting edge that this technology has and very excited about what that can potentially lead to in the near term. Then on gallium and germanium -- well, on germanium in particular, we've tested some defense scrap that's got contamination from other metals, and we've successfully removed those contaminants from the germanium scrap from a defense contractor. We've tested germanium tailings from a zinc operation where there's low levels of germanium. And we've enriched it by several orders of magnitude. So that's another really exciting opportunity. Again, gallium and germanium were some of the 2 metals that we spoke about quite frequently in the early days, and they're still very, very opportunistic and important, hopefully, soon for commerciality going forward, and then obviously, e-waste. And then the more recent addition to the portfolio is catalytic converters, which are the spent units that sit on combustion and hybrid vehicles for treating the emissions from these vehicles. And the catalytic converter can be up to like $300,000 a tonne type of contained metal value. So super high value and we've had good recoveries of the platinum, palladium and rhodium, these very niche but precious metals. So putting out something on that soon. And we're actively trying to get a supply agreement for that type of feedstock as well at the moment. And a couple of diagrams there, what shows you what catalytic converters looks like on the left-hand side, which is like a powder. It doesn't need any preprocessing, much simpler than printed circuit boards. And then on the right-hand side, it shows some of the rare earth chloride product that we've made from that raw ore, so yes, very exciting about what that can potentially lead to. Next slide, please. And then this is just to remind you what the business model is, there's 2 overall engines of how we will get value from this technology and this overall company. One is the build-own operate where we will own a plant like Gator Point in Texas, and we will purchase feedstock, process it, recover the metals and then sell those metals. So we're calling that build-own operation. And that's where we see in the near term at Gator Point, we want to be doing gallium and germanium scrap from Indium and obviously, the printed circuit board. So we've already sourced from Glencore Dynamic and Plastic Recyclers. And we already have 4,000 tonnes per annum secured of those printed circuit board feedstocks for electronic waste. And then on the Processing-as-a-Service, now we've had our first announcement this morning with ECT, Environmental Clean Technologies about how this Processing-as-a-Service business model might work and these are from MXenes, which we've never really spoken about in the past, but I'll explain about those in a moment. But that's a really exciting -- and it's our first commercial revenue, which we're very excited about. And what it can lead to potentially in the future is a more formal royalty agreement and licensing opportunity, assuming that we have a successful initial R&D phase with them, which can take up to 12 months, but hopefully, it will take a lot quicker than that. And we have continuous dialogue with our existing partners, Meteoric Resources. They've got the Brazilian ionic clay project, and we're actually doing testing right now on some new MREC material that they've recently supplied us. So that's still a very much live and exciting opportunity. Additionally, with Ucore, we have regular dialogue with Ucore. And as soon as we've got some product from the Meteoric testing, we'll be giving that to Ucore for doing the back-end separation. And then on the red mud, our existing LOI with ElementUSA has been extended. So has our Meteoric Resources MOU, I should mention. And we're also still in dialogue with Vedanta. And dealing with bigger mining companies like Vedanta, they just move a bit of a slower pace than we would necessarily like to deal with. But it's still a very much a live opportunity both with Vedanta and USA. Next slide, please. And then our government engagement, it continues at a very high pace. We've now identified over USD 600 million of different opportunities, and we've got about at least 17 or 18 different applications are soon to be applied for opportunities. And then something more recent that we've announced during the quarter is a strategic collaboration with AmForge. AmForge is a group of guys who are ex Glencore and also ex White House and they're focused on sourcing critical metals for the U.S. government. And we're very excited about what that potential AmForge opportunity could potentially lead to in terms of government support and also projects that they are introducing us to. One recent thing that had some press is our West Virginia and rare earth element recovery from tailings. And this is an AmForge opportunity. And we will more formally announce what this could potentially lead to once -- hopefully, it comes with some either DOE or DOW funding. But for the time being, it's an exciting opportunity to recover rare earth element out of coal leachate and coal tailings, and the Flash Joule Heating technology has successfully been used in the past to get rare earths out of both coal fly ash and also different tailing streams. So we aren't going to really speak too much more about that until it comes with actual government funding, but it is a genuine and real opportunity. And there's similar opportunities on manganese that AmForge have introduced us to. But again, until something is more binding in nature, we will not be speaking about it. But outside of that, we've got a lot of exciting opportunities with the U.S. government, and It's very hard to be definitive regarding timing, but there's a huge amount of work underway. We've got people in D.C. permanently now helping us and hopefully, something soon is going to come to fruition. Next slide, please. And then to explain our announcement this morning with ECT. So ECT is another ASX-listed company. They've got the exclusive license for a particular application of Flash Joule Heating for making MXenes and also for the destruction of PFAS, which are these forever chemicals that are often associated with oil and gas production. But the MXenes opportunity is something that we are quite excited about. MXenes, they're like graphene, you can think of them like graphene, they're like a super material, 2-dimensional in nature. They're very, very small scale, so they're nano materials, so 10 to the minus 9 of a meter in terms of the scale at which they have their properties become apparent. And it's been shown that -- by Rice University that you can make these MXene materials using flash joule heating. And the traditional methods for making these are not scalable and they use hydrofluoric acid, which is a very nasty material. And the flash joule heating method is a potential way to not have to use hydrofluoric acid and also is a scalable method as we've shown, we've already scaled the technology of 400,000 times since its inception. And you've basically taken a feedstock, which can be titanium-bearing feedstock, any transition metal really seems to work. But the proposition is once you've done your process, your resultant MXenes product is -- has got very, very unique and monetizable properties and there's a huge application for defense, in particular, for example, electromagnetic shielding, so you can potentially use this compound to shield your drone or your F35 fighter jet from certain types of radar and other type of electromagnetic radiation. So there's a huge potential scope for the super materials. It's similar to graphene but even more so. And from what I've read, the sell price for these compounds is enormous to over -- in some cases, $100 per gram is some of the figures that I've read. So super high value potential product. And I believe -- I'm no expert on these MXenes yet, but I believe most of the MXenes in the world are coming from hydrofluoric acid processes in China. And the U.S. government is actively looking for alternative sources to China. Next slide, please. And Rice University has shown that you can apply flash joule heating and chlorine, which is exactly what we're doing for metal recovery to make these MXene products from -- the feedstock is called MAX phase, and there's a bit more detail in our announcement as to what that actually means. But effectively, you're taking a feedstock, you put it through the flash reactor under the presence of chlorine, and you can potentially make these MXene product. So ECT, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel themselves and develop their own reactor, we've already got a reactor that's significantly scaled up. And the same process that we're using for metal recovery can be applied to these MXenes. So it's a logical marriage between us and ECT. And it's also today, our first commercial revenue, and it's a significant amount of money for us. It's up to AUD 2 million over the 12-month period. And assuming we have success, fingers crossed, that they can make these MXene products using one of our smaller reactors at Gator Point, then it will lead to a more formal licensing arrangement with ECT, where there'll be a royalty on the recovered product. And we also have -- we'll be selling ECT potential capital equipment in terms of reactor systems. So yes, super excited about what this could potentially lead to and it's effectively using our IP and our engineering knowledge that we've developed over the last 2 years and monetizing that. So super excited about what this could potentially lead to. Next slide, please. And then just to try and show where this fits on those 2 business models, the Processing-as-a-Service really the initial step is this evaluation phase where a company like ECT is evaluating our process. And assuming that this pilot program is successful, then it will lead to technology license arrangement, reactor and equipment supply, which has been additional revenue for us, and then there should be ongoing services and spare parts types of revenue as well in addition to the royalty stream. Next slide, please. And then just to mention that the strategy or the plan to get our existing American depository receipts, these ADRs that are trading on the OTC currently uplist it to NASDAQ by the end of the year. So the order for that to happen, the PCAOB audit, that's almost complete. And there's been no red flags identified so far. So that's all in progress. So subject to board approval and market conditions at the time, we do still and plan to have our ADRs up listed on NASDAQ by the end of the year. And we've got a search underway for additional U.S. directors to help us with that strategy. Next slide, please. And then just some upcoming catalysts over the coming months. As I said I'm going to putting out that testing update regarding these alternative feedstocks like rare earth elements ores, catalytic converters germanium-type residues and scraps. So that's coming soon. The multi reactor test on the larger units using chlorine, as soon as we get that permit, we'll be getting that testing underway. I mentioned the NASDAQ listing. And then by the last quarter of the year, we want to be demonstrating this preprocessing circuit that we're effectively finalizing at the moment. We want to be showing and demonstrating that the flow sheet that we've developed is producing what we anticipated. So we want to be putting out an announcement regarding that by Q4. And then anything we can mention on government engagement, obviously, we will as soon as we can. But it is very much still the case that we would hope something eventually it's quite soon in that space this quarter or next quarter regarding some significant support from the U.S. government. And then any additional licensing or similar deals that we can announce, we will as soon as we can. And it is the vision and the plan that we will be generating revenue from our printed circuit board, our e-waste vertical by H1 next year and hopefully even sooner than that. So that's the target. Next slide, please. And then, yes, just closing points. The main message really from the quarter is the technology, this Flash Joule Heating technology, which is our core IP, it's something we've licensed a little over 2 years ago, and we've scaled it up significantly in that time period. That's been substantially derisked. We've proven the scale model, which is multiple semi-batch reactors. We've proven that, that has merit, and we will hopefully soon have this multi-reactor run using chlorine and getting metal recoveries. But that's a significant achievement in such a short space of time, I really need to underline that, that scaling something up that rapidly in such a short time frame is almost unheard of. So it's credit to the team and the technical team where it's due, and our team in Texas is now nearly 30 people. So there's been a substantial effort to make that happen. And the opportunity with ECT that we've announced today just is hopefully an example of how many growth opportunities there will be in the future. And look, we are very diligent. I know I've mentioned several feedstocks and applications, and we're not going to be a Jack of all trades and a master of none, we are very diligent as to which feedstocks we are pursuing and what we focus on. But there really is a huge breadth of potential for the technology, not just on e-waste, not just on rare earths, but on these new applications like MXenes today, and there's potentially going to be more coming in the future. So yes, it's a true technology platform and the effort that we put in to date is hopefully going to bear fruit in the very near term to commercialize a lot of those opportunities. Next slide, please. And that's it. Yes, so we're -- we've got a very healthy balance sheet. We have substantially derisked the technology and whilst the general market and macro conditions are very tough, we are in that fortunate position to have a healthy balance sheet, and we're just going to keep our heads down and get on with making the technology scalable and hitting these milestones. So I might finish it there, David.

Thanks, Michael. A very detailed presentation. And we have received a large number of questions, and we'll get through as many as we can in the sort of 10 to 15 minutes we've allocated for Q&A. And I would say, if we don't get through to every question, we will endeavor to get back to people directly and answer their questions. And I've tried to group them as much as I can. There's a lot of positive notes here in relation to the achievements of the quarter. There's obviously a couple of points in relation to slippage on timing, as you've discussed, and that's the nature of building out a project such as this. Can I just look in terms of the core FJH platform. As you said, now substantially derisked after more than 100 test campaigns and the prolonged multi-reactor campaign. What exactly has been proven and what remains to be demonstrated before commercial operations?

Look, the main point is that scaling up any process technology, anything where you have a feedstock coming in and you're trying to recover metals, it's completely nonlinear. And it generally takes tens of years for any traditional techniques to become generally accepted. Like the rotary kiln probably took 20 years when it was invented 100 years ago or more to be widely adopted. So the main thing that we've achieved during the quarter is proving that our current method of applying this Flash Joule Heating, this ultrafast electrical energy into a small space and also getting the solids mixed in a uniform fashion and getting good recoveries, we've effectively substantiated our design and we've effectively proven that design that it works and now the next trick is to get that to work on a continuous basis for prolonged periods. So the technology has been effectively proven at scale, and 400,000x increase in scale in less than 2 years, as I said, is almost unprecedented. So we're very happy that the method Flash Joule Heating, electrical-based, ultrafast heating and chlorination chemistry works. And now we need to prove that, that can work on a prolonged scale over a long period. So the next big milestone is doing that pre-reactor test using chlorine. When we can do 3 reactors, in theory, we can do 50 reactors whatever we need to get to the particular scale that we need. Now on e-waste, we originally anticipated that the majority of the printed circuit board was going to go through the reactors. Because of this preprocessing work and the more detailed understanding that we now have of PCBs, we will most likely not have to put maybe less than 50% of the original PCB mass through a reactor. So what that means in practice for what we thought we would originally need, say, 24 reactors for -- so this 8,000 tonnes, we can potentially get away with a lot of these reactors and still get the same overall metal recovery and economic outcome at the back end. So that's been quite a substantial development. We can effectively put less through the flash reactor and still get the same overall economics of the back door. And just -- and another point as well, so when we originally got this Gator Point facility, the original application for our permit was for a 1 ton per day demonstration facility. And because of the confidence that we've gained in the meantime, we've then significantly increased that over 5x in terms of our scale -- our design scale, that's part of the reason why we've had to modify the chlorine permit in addition to having -- to move the chlorination activities from the main central building. So there has been a slight delay, but it's for good reason. The scale is significantly more than we originally anticipated. And when we were making these projections 12 months ago, we were doing so with the best available knowledge at the time. And now that the scale is bigger and we've had some teething issues with the roof, but we'll soon resolve those. But yes, it's been a major quarter for us in terms of validation of the technology.

Now I apologize if I jump around. I'm trying to sort of get to as many questions as possible. You touched on the proposed U.S. listing in the PCAOB order and how that's progressing. Subject to all of that working out and the Board are determining it would proceed with a listing on the main board at NASDAQ. Do you think that would be a company by a capital raising or strategic investment?

Look, at this stage, there's no need for us to raise capital. And I think we would only entertain that if there was a true strategic investor who wanted to get involved and I think we are in that fortunate position now of having a $65 million in the bank not needing to raise. And as part of that NASDAQ listing, we will only decide that it should proceed based on the advice at the time and also market conditions. So it is still the plan to do the NASDAQ and we're -- technically, we're doing a level 2, a compliance listing where we don't raise capital at the same time. So there is no plan to raise money at the time. And right now, we've got a search that's quite advanced underway for additional U.S.-based directors to sit on that board and be truly independent directors, which is one of the requirements for the NASDAQ.

And there was a question that came through from that. What sort of person or persons are you looking for if that proceeds? What's the...

Yes. It's something that we've been spending a lot of time internally on. So current candidates would include people with the defense background, also existing capital markets experience in the U.S., including listed experience, like NASDAQ experience and also people with familiarity with the rare earth element space in the U.S. And then just more generally speaking, in terms of true independence, also looking at other like professional directors who would have that true independence CV and would sit on quite a lot of prominent existing boards as a NED -- an independent NED. So -- but yes, it's -- ideally, we want people who is going to complement the team and our aspirations to be truly making a big impact in helping the U.S. solve their critical metals processing issues and also help the defense industry and ideally, it will come with someone with additional people with experience in the capital markets space so that we can make this NASDAQ debut as successful as possible.

Probably a bit of a direct question. You're a shareholder. Are you disappointed with the delays that have occurred and what have you learned from them?

I am. Look, I'm one of the major shareholders and recently took the opportunity because we get very limited opportunity because of the blackout periods, especially around quarterly reports to buy stocks, so yes, I took that opportunity recently and bought as much as I possibly could that my wife will let me to. So yes, look I'm super invested in the company and yes, it is disappointing just, I suppose, the general transition that the small cap sector on the Australian Stock Exchange has seen in the last, say, 6 months, in particular, with the recent capital gains tax changes, which seems to have reduced liquidity in our sector and also just, I suppose, sentiment towards our space. But I think if you listen to people like Warren Buffett, he says, patient capital will be rewarded. So we're just going to keep our heads down. We're fortunate that we have enough money in the bank to keep progressing our ambitions. And hopefully, as soon as the sentiment returns, this thing will turn around. So yes, look, it has been so destroying as to watch the value decrease. But we've -- in the last quarter, in the last 6 months, we've substantially derisked the company and the technology, in particular, and we've increased all the commercial opportunities by almost tenfold, and there's a lot of exciting things to come in the future. So I think just patient capital will be rewarded. That's my main message.

A couple of technical questions. So I'll apologize in advance if I get them wrong in the asking, have you experimented with bromine and/or fluorine in the place of chlorine in your machines at all?