Stephen Clarke
Analyst · Oppenheimer
Thank you, Greg, and thank you, Lisa. And welcome everybody to the 2016 quarter three earnings call for Aqua Metals. As Greg mentioned, I’m Steve Clarke and I’m here to take you through the summary of where we are since the last quarterly update, and here with me is Tom Murphy who later on I'll be handing over to and he will be taking us through a summary of the financials. So you heard Greg read the Safe Harbor statement there it is in writing and we will move on. So I am just opening this with - really the key points here and the headline is that we are now moved into - we are transitioning into commercial operations now and doing so we are proving that the Company has the potential to change $22 billion lead market. And as I go through this presentation, I'll be bringing out some examples of that. And the three key points that I want to talk about today is that we've made lead now at first of what would be several AquaRefining facilities and in a few minutes I'll show you a short video of the first lead being made and some highlights of that. And part of that is an update that the facility that we've built and are now transitioning into production has the capacity to produce 120 tons of lead per day not the 80 tons a day that we initially gave guidance on them and obviously I would say more about that. Where we are right now is we have a single six electrolyzer module installed and commissioned, five more being commissioned and in total we’ll have 16 AquaRefining modules on site. We plan to sell pure lead, AquaRefined lead in quarter four and we’ve also [indiscernible]. We figure out how to operate the facility in a more flexible way than we would originally considered and we’ve developed some intermediate products which allow us to accelerate revenue ramp up and accelerate into positive cash flow and we expand our capacity to 120 tons a day in early 2017. So we are a little bit behind where we thought we would be in terms of commissioning when I gave the last Company update. But I think we’ve more than compensated that with about 50% uplift in the capacity of the facility. The second bullet point here is that, I’ve mentioned before we want to build up to 800 tons a day of our own lead recycling capacity and with 120 tons under our belt we are looking to expand into the remainder. We've been talking to and I have given guidance on this in the past that we’ve been talking to providers of another non-diluting, non-equity funding and we progress those discussions to the point now that we are literally visiting sites today. Two of our guys are onsite looking at potential AquaRefining or places to sign AquaRefining facilities right now. As we look at those, as we look at building them, and as we built them and got numbers of our own first facility, we can now project that an expectation of a 30% IRR for each 160 tons per day AquaRefinery at a capital cost of about $50 million each which represents a fairly good sound investment opportunity. The other key point is that we have established and we continue to establish important permitting precedents which could - hopefully should accelerate our roll out. And then the third key point really is that we are generating very strong interest in licensing to third-parties. It’s been our stated goal that we would expand this business through a fully serviced license business model in which we will provide equipment to third-parties. We will maintain it and provide spare parts and continued maintenance to third-parties on a licensing basis. Well we have taken those conversations to the point that we have now tested feed stocks from third-parties, already successfully taking in feed stocks from third-parties who have been expressed and interested in licensing on equipment and we’ve made lead from them. And then we expect to start shipping licensed AquaRefining equipment during 2017. What we wanted to before that is actually operate our own facility, make sure we've learnt everything we can and absolutely not fall in to the trap of having our licensees beyond beta testers. We're not a software company, we are an equipment company and we live or breathe on the reliability of the equipment services that we provide through that. And then the last key point in there is that we’ve been looking hard and how do we manage very large regions like China, India and potentially the FSU. And we’ve developed a Master License approach and we are really working that hard with China as the example right now with parties who could be credible partners in China and would manage a Master License and manage the sub-licensing and all of the actions that go around that. And overall, we’ve said this number of times, we plan to do for lead what Bessemer and Nucor did for steel and then we can touch on that later on. So moving on, I’ve shown this slide pretty much every time I’ve given an update because it still shows just how important lead is to the global battery industry and even with a Gigafactory coming on stream and overall large-scale lithium production facilities announced around the world. When measured by production capacity lithium is still pretty much [surrounding] in the world of batteries and energy storage. And there is an interesting development that we’ve been watching; China is a country with the most advanced electric vehicle fleet in the world. And what we are hearing is that there is pretty strong evidence that China was beginning to refocus on low cost lead powered electric vehicles as their primary way of electrifying the morning commute and evening commute, so the mass transportation of people into and out of working school is the major transport challenge of the modern world. And China looks to be swinging back towards lead as a potential energy storage choice for that market which we think is pretty encouraging. So I have shown this slide a couple of times as well and it really outlines that the key process that in an AquaRefinery and I’ve used in the past to show that each one of our steps is wet. And if you keep something wet it’s pretty difficult to make a gas over dust. But it also shows is that there are number of key elements in an AquaRefinery, for example the front-end where we break a battery and then we separate out the plastics and the metallics and what is referred to as lead paste. And then there is a stream of production in which the lead paste is what's called desulphurized before its AquaRefined and then turn into ingots of high purity primary lead. And it’s a parallel stream that comes from the breaker in which the metallic lead that’s the lead alloys that are used to make the lead grids is a separate stream and that goes into an ingoting process and [indiscernible] secondary lead or as lead alloys. The most of our timing in building and planning this business, we viewed the process of commissioning is to be one in which we would have to get every single one of those process is fully commissioned in synchronization before we could turn on. And we came to realize that quite so obviously maintaining the ideal situation is difficult than unrealistic in the real world of operating large scale plant that’s going to consume hundreds of tons of batteries a day and produce hundreds of tons of lead a day. So we put a lot of work into looking how we can delink those processes from each other. So for example, running larger or lower quantities of metallic lead through the ingoting side and larger or lower quantities of lead paste through the desulphurization and ultimately into AquaRefining. And what we have been able to do is actually achieve the ability to delink those processes. That’s’ given as a large degree of flexibility in how we operate the plant. And it allows us to actually release additional capacity that gets us to the 120 tons a day. In that process, there are number of products that we can actually sell and selling to battery companies the direct using in battery production. I am not going to expand on what those products are; we are taking the decision to keep those as a trade secret. Obviously, our competitors would love to know what we are doing in the details of an AquaRefinery and something we are not going to release publicly. But essentially we’ve used the flexibility inherent in that process to allow us to go from 80 tons a day of plant capacity into 120 tons a day of plant capacity. So moving on, the photographs of the first facility and the key points we’ve build and made our first lead, we’ve assayed at is better than 99% pure. We are providing samples to battery companies and potential licensees for them to analyze and validate for themselves. One of the key precedents that we set or established rather is that the State of Nevada is determined that AquaRefining is not subject to NESHAP standard which is the permitting standard required for smelters. And that’s a federal rule, not a state rule and we think that’s an important part of establishing precedents that will help us accelerate roll out and expansion and we believe this is one of our core strengths. So I am going to move now to a short video which shows the startup of our first AquaRefinery. Unfortunately, we can’t do audio with video so you're going to lose my voice for just a minute as we run through the video and so we’ll be back as soon as we’ve play this. Now into licensing. It’s appropriate that we share with people what exactly is that we are doing. So what that video showed was a single module of six electrolyzers, each electrolyzer has a series of large rotating-disk cathodes. They rotate during the plating process and are continuously scraped. What we plate is a very, very high surface area form of lead that consists primarily of nanostructures of lead in very, very, very high surface area. The cathodes are continuously stripped, the lead comes off, drops on to a conveyor then it’s taken off to a machine that we call a [indiscernible] that compresses that soft lead. What it actually does? It consolidates the lead into solid metallic lead at room temperature and it’s quite a remarkable process. We’ve taken the decision to then put that into an ingot machine and make a standard ingot of lead for sale. Okay. So moving on, really I want to talk about business expansion at this point and the three elements: the Tahoe Reno Industrial Complex, we want to increase our projected capacity for TRIC from 120 tons a day to 160 tons a day and focus on establishing Aqua branded lead as a premium high purity lead. We believe we've got the capability to do that. Then we are going to add additional AquaRefineries in North America. And as I mentioned earlier, discussions on non-diluting funding to build a total of 800 tons a day, they are progressing well. We started visiting potential sites and firming up our power plants. And then the large part of what we want to do next is to launch into equipment licensing during 2017. And I mentioned earlier that we’ve completed initial testing of feed stock. We’ve developed a Master Franchisee model. And what we want to do is complete about nine months of operation of TRIC before we start delivering modules to third-parties, but that doesn't mean that we're going to wait for nine months before we actually establish any licensing relationships. So this next slide is really trying to show the scale of the upside to the business and we bounded this time around in $22 billion lead market. To put that in perspective, the AquaRefinery that was built at Tahoe Reno Industrial Complex is currently got a capacity of 120 tons a day and we are going to expand it to 160 tons a day. At 160 tons a day it will have 32 AquaRefining modules. But it will be just 0.2% of the world’s lead production and we’re projecting revenue between $100 million and $120 million a year of that scale. If we build five AquaRefineries totaling 800 tons a day that will be 160 modules which is still be just 2.1% of the world’s lead production, but it would give us somewhere in a region of $500 million to $600 million a year in revenue. To address the bulk of the market which is 38,000 tons a day and many people think that’s actually a significant under estimate. The number of AquaRefining modules would lead to having service is 7,500 to represent 100% of world lead and that’s a $22 billion market. So you can see - for us the key point is that transition into licensing. We don’t think we could build fast enough to actually manage the lead demand and you can see the scale of the upside as we roll out into licensing. And what we found is that as we built the facility as we did in our open-day and we invited people along to look at it. We are at the point now where a very large majority of North American battery manufacturing and distribution and even a significant amount of smelting capacity has been to our facility, looked at it and been incredibly receptive to it. What we are seeing is the lead market and the customers for lead-acid batteries and those who make lead-acid batteries are highly receptive to a clean alternative to smelting and a source of high purity lead. And one of the things that history shows is that if you have a traded commodity and you develop a step change into how that traded commodity is manufactured. A step change improves cost quality or some other important thing, in our case all three. You generally - to get it right you can generate exceptional returns and precedents for that include Henry Bessemer who invented the dominant process for manufacturing steel in the 1890s, Nucor who came along later on and displaced blast furnaces with mini furnaces. Pilkington who in the 1960s developed the way that all of the world’s glass is made and soon as we figured out how to make the silicon wafers in a form pure enough and cheap enough to trigger the silicon revolution. So very large returns are made with step changes to globally traded commodities. So at the point, I'm going to hand over to the financial guide. Tom?