Our First Question Period

On November 10th, Zimtu Capital hosted it’s first Question Period, where attendees were encouraged to join a video conference call that allowed them to ask company Presidents, CEO’s, and Directors any questions they may have.

We had a great turnout and our company representatives we’re all asked some great, detailed questions.

We’ve gathered some here for you, but the full question period was recorded and posted on our Zimtu YouTube Page, along with individual short clips of each companies questions.

Chris Grove (Commerce Resources President)

Question 1: Based on the two million in private placement, how long will the money last and what will you do with it?

Two million dollars, how long will that last? It could last us for a year, but the more important answer to the question is what work will this capital allow us to complete? And that is something very exciting in terms of our ability to now restart our pilot plant, research in Golden Colorado, and then to produce the rare earth element concentrate samples that so many companies have requested from us, including the Austrian and the German companies such as Tri Bok or Remy, BASF, Siemens and then at the top of the list, honestly, is the American company Energy Fuels, as they are the first rare earth element processor in North America to actually successfully produce rare earth element concentrates. And so the two million dollars that we’re working on right now will allow us, as I say, to restart the pilot plant and produce these samples with which then we are hopeful that one of these industry majors will then join us in a project level investment to finance the completion of the pre feasibility study and the bankable feasibility study. So this is a very exciting moment for us. Thank you.

Question 2: OK, and the next question comes from Nathan. He says he’s been with the company for 15 plus years. What he would like to know is if there is a chance that you could give any type of timeframe as to when Commerce Resources could have a mine up and running. Are we still another five to 10 years from that goal?

It’s a very good question. I mean, generally speaking, in terms of mineral exploration, people often say the from debris to production is seven to 10 years, and that is relevant within what might be called a normal market. And I would say hardly could we consider the last decade a normal market in terms of the venture exchange. Nine years ago was trading at twenty six hundred points today at six hundred and change. So it’s been arguably one of the most difficult decades in mineral exploration ever. Commerce Resources by May of 2012 had economics out on both of our projects, which is so significant and fundamentally important to the development of these assets. In terms of everything right now, we’re actually at a very interesting inflection point, turning point where we are seeing more interest coming from industry, governments and investors than we have ever before. And that includes for our Blue River Tantalum and niobium project, which is arguably the largest defined resource of tantalum on planet Earth. And so I am very hopeful that we will see a much faster progress of the development of both of our assets. And so, no, I would hope that within five years we are able to have both projects in production.

Ron McDonald (Zinc8 Energy Solutions CEO)

Question 3: When could zinc start production and does the company have enough money to the moment of production? Or will the shareholders capital be diluted by a large margin?

Well, thank you for that question. So the company’s trajectory to market would be late 2022-2023. That would be with a hundred kilowatt product. We are currently working on a 40 kilowatt buildout for the Surrey house, which will be delivered by the end of 2020 sometime in December. We’ll be putting some zone on that and the next little bit. We’re currently examining internally whether or not we have a revenue product that could be produced in 2021 late quarter. That would be a 20-40 kilowatt, which are already producing. We actually have the battery that’s going to serve house and our backcloth down the street in Vancouver. So we’re in production. I wouldn’t call it commercial production. Commercial production is scheduled for 2022 fourth quarter, first quarter 2023. We anticipate the first year of operations, 40 to 80 megawatts. We always said 40 megawatts. But we’re listening to the market and we know that the market is going to be much larger than that. And that would have us between 80 and 160 million dollars in revenue in our first year of operations.

The second question is a good question. I’ve been thinking about this since the company went public. We have raised just under seven million dollars. That is not a lot of money when you’re a company that is in pre-production. We have a large, very qualified staff out of Ash street. I think we have 12 engineers, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, process engineers. So it is a real business. Now we’ve got just around 30 people that are working to get these deadlines. We have contracts. We’ve got two large contracts which we’ve already announced, one with New York Power Authority, one with digital energy, supported by my circuit in New York. So we have project deadlines and we’re on we’re on path to meet all of those deadlines to get to production is going to cost between 35 and 50 million dollars. The reason I say 35-50 is that we’re negotiating with various jurisdictions who are offering us some significant incentives to locate our assembly and manufacturing in their jurisdictions. So that could that’s between thirty five and 50. We think that’s about fifteen million dollars. So we are going to have to raise that money and we’re looking at the different ways and we’re in active discussions and negotiations on those things. But I think the thing to focus on is the value of the company. We’re entering into a billion dollar market, I should actually say we’re entering into a trillion dollar market and we’re the first ones entering that market for long duration, low cost storage. We are in discussions and negotiations with some of the largest branded companies in the world. I’m not at liberty to say but they’re some of the largest branded companies in the world. We’re dealing with utilities all around the globe. We’re dealing with private sector partners. We know the performance. It’ll take us another couple of years of development. We’re building five batteries internally next year so we can accelerate our path to producing this product for the market. So, yeah, we’re going to need more money and we’re going to look after the interests of the shareholders and we will select the the best financing that we can in the interest of the shareholders.

Question 4: Great, thanks, Ron. There’s another question that just came in, have there been any updates on the agreement and principles from India and Australia? Is there any details on that?

Yeah, the agreements and principles that we have established, we have working groups with both of them. And they will take a little time to flesh out. One of the reasons is, I’ll be quite honest guys, I love zoom calls, but I love in-person meetings more. In order to really build a relationship, a partnership with other companies, I like to evolve. So that slows down a bit because we can’t do that today. So there’s an extra layer of caution that you’ve got to go through. We are progressing nicely with Vijai. We’re looking at their manufacturing capacity and they have we have given them the specs for a number of significant parts and they are currently putting some quotes together for us, which is really important. Vijai has contracts with every state utility in India and with the national utility. They’re operating 42 countries. Those that have heard me before, you know that my view is that we grow this company not by selling batteries, but by establishing pipelines of projects.

Ofer Vicus & Chris Parr (Aduro & Dimension 5 Technologies)

Question 5: Assuming you have a smaller prototype of the hydraulic system, how can you be confident that this system will scale to the size that is needed on a large vessel and maintain the same efficiency?

Ofer: Yeah, living in in Europe with Morning in Vancouver and thank you very much for having me actually quite excited. It is important question. It’s better than any any activity that relate to technology development. And I recognize that there is a risk. I guess it’s a part of the fun and the requirement. You go and ask for money because you have some some embedded risk on one hand. And the beauty is that if you can mitigate it, it’s moving on and you get to kind of enjoy the fruits of it. As for the for the question itself, the author Selecta, kind of a focus, perhaps a little bit on the on the reactor design and maybe just put a bit of it backwards, the chemical reaction that we’re doing in the past. So I’ll try to answer it in two stages. There is a item related to the chemistry that we’re doing and then there is the reactor design. That’s that’s I don’t know if you wanted to focus on both, but I think the answer would be simple. So let’s start with a chemical reaction. So so we’ve been working and monitoring the work in the lab for several years. We got we built over the years quite a good handle group on the models of what we’re doing. And I can say that the chemistry that we’re seeing in the lab for simplicity of discussion, none of them is is consuming a lot of energy. And we are either releasing a lot of energy. That means in say that they are more or less easier to handle single that if we we were to see maybe red lights there, we will deal with that prior to building any reactors. So now once we got a good grip and handle on what’s going on in the reactor in terms of the chemical, on the chemistry, we moved on into the reactor design. And that’s kind of the subject of these questions in terms of reactor design. It’s actually the we feel it’s actually the easier part to see what we’re doing in terms of the design is more of a regular engineering practice is nothing, nothing fancy in the reactor design. A lot of the knowledge comes back to the chemical models that we are building up, saying that it is embedded with some risk because as I mentioned and for that reason, what you know, in the deal as a showroom and then stage two as a higher model professionally, the intel in the in the company, we call it reactor one, reactor two and reactor three, where I want is actually the reactor, the sense of reactor we’ve been playing in the lab for for many, many years. And our two is the showroom is just a reactor that is more or less of the continuous flow that is doing everything we are asking to. But we don’t scale it monstrously knowing that we have issues embedded in it and trying to solve it later. Where are three, which is the pilot? It’s that twenty x thirty six of the current reactor system. So you see our is to grow with reactor size while mitigating the risk. So we, we try to based on the information that we have, we’re trying to assess how much money do we need. We’re willing to risk in order to provide the proper, I’ll say, reactor feat. So far we haven’t seen any red lights and we think, well, we see so far and we assess it is more related to optimization rather than new chemistry that we have in the tank. And because of the information provided before by the chemical structure that we are aware of inside and about the fact that we’re more or less using general practice of of reactor design, nothing fancy here. We feel we could accomplish it in a fairly low, lower risk.

We had a great turnout to our inaugural question period and we hope to see you at the next one.

To watch the full event, check it out the recorded version on YouTube.