Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for participating in The Metals Company Second [Third] (sic) Quarter 2022 Corporate Update Conference Call. Joining us today are The Metals Company's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Gerard Baron; and Chief Financial Officer, Craig Shesky. Following their remarks, we will open up the call for your questions. Before we go any further, I would like to turn the call over to CFO, Craig Shesky, as he reads the company’s Safe Harbor statement within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that provides important cautions regarding forward-looking statements and information about the use of non-GAAP measures. Craig, please go ahead.

Thanks very much. Thanks for joining our third quarter 2022 conference call. And please note that during this call, certain statements made by the company will be forward-looking and based on management’s beliefs and assumptions from information available at this time. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control, including those set forth in our Safe Harbor provisions are forward-looking statements that can be found at the end of our third quarter 2022 corporate update press release. Such statements may also be found in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021 and other reports subsequently filed with the SEC, all that provide further detail about the risks related to our business. Additionally, please note that the Company's actual results may differ materially from those anticipated and except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. Our remarks today may also include non-GAAP financial measures, including with respect to free cash flows, additional details regarding these non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures can be found in our slide deck being used with this call. And the slide deck is available on our website at investors.metals.co. And I'll now turn it over to Gerard Barron, The Metals Company’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Gerard, please go ahead.

Thank you, Craig, and good afternoon and thank you all for joining us today for our third quarter 2022 corporate update call. You are welcome to follow along with our slide deck or if you are joining us by phone, you can also access it at any time at investors.metals.co. The last few months have been filled with historic achievements for TMC, NORI and our strategic partner, Allseas. I'm speaking to you now from Mexico right before welcoming back the Hidden Gem and its remarkable team from a long and complex campaign testing in our pilot system in the NORI-D area. Following the ISA's recommendations in September to begin pilot nodule collection trials on the NORI-D area, Allseas commissioned and integrated pilot collection system from the Hidden Gem. And in October, we celebrated the first integrated collection and list of polymetallic nodules in the CCZ since the 1970s. Over the following weeks, Allseas put the system to the test, driving the pilot collector over 80 kilometers across the seafloor, collecting 4,500 tonnes of nodules and lifting over 3,000 tonnes to the surface. Beyond demonstrating the operational capabilities of the system, the pilot collection trial is the single most important milestone in terms of generating environmental impact data. Before this pilot trial began, 16 offshore campaigns were executed in the NORI area to collect environmental baseline data. And during the pilot trials, a team of environmental independent researchers, scientists and contractors were monitoring the environmental impacts of the trials, and they will continue their work on site until the end of the year to survey the post trials environment. We look forward to sharing this data with the global community in the coming months. This quarter also saw some important financial milestones. On our last corporate update call in August, we…

Thanks a lot, Gerard. So we've seen this slide many times before, and have shared in previous update calls. In March of 2021, AMC Consultants issued an SEC regulation SK 1300 compliant initial assessment of the project economics for the NORI-D area. And this initial assessment is available in the Investors section of our website. And the NORI area, the financial model can also be found beginning on Page 310 of that document at investors.metals.co. The initial assessment arrived at a net present value of 6.8 billion for the NORI-D area at the beginning of last year. But running the same model simply updated for current metal prices, the net present value of NORI-D would be approximately $16 billion, on just 22% of our total estimated resource. However, in terms of valuation, we think we're trading at a multiple of fundamental value that's effectively 20x lower than what one would expect for a preproduction base metal company at this stage of project life, creating a huge potential rewriting opportunity as we continue to derisk this project. The peers on this page are mainly copper producers, as it's difficult to find a handful of pure play publicly traded nickel comps at similar stages of preproduction. And this further underscores the opportunity. But how do we get away from this undervalued position? Well, this stage lays out some of the critical milestones we believe are key to unlocking the potential of the NORI-D project and the rest of the resource portfolio. We secured financing for at least another 12 months, we completed NORI-D pilot collection system trials. And we are working to lock in commercial terms for Project Zero. And some of the next critical milestones would be: one, the ISA finalizing exploitation regulation; two, NORI submitting an output application for NORI-D…

Yes, thanks, Craig. So before we wrap up, I would like to extend an official welcome to Andy Greig, who recently joined the TMC Board and has now assumed the role as Lead Independent Director. Andy was previously a member of the DeepGreen Board, a predecessor company, and brings extensive experience working on international construction projects in the mining sector during a 35-year career at Bechtel. I'd also like to welcome Grant Lindner on Board as our Project Director for NORI. Grant has spent the last 25 years at Bechtel and BHP delivering over $26 billion in project value and holding various senior roles in mining and marine projects. He got to spend time with our entire team last month, and it's clear that he's going to fit in well as a leader at TMC. And at the same time it was with sadness that we reported our Chief Development Officer, Tony O'Sullivan’s upcoming departure due to personal and health reasons. Tony has been a pioneer in this new industry. And he's a dear friend and colleague. I'm pleased that he'll be staying on for the next year in a transition period. And I know, I'll be able to count on his counsel and wisdom far beyond that point. Tony and the rest of the project team put the company on a path to success. And it's been great to see the fruits of those efforts culminate in some of the historic milestones achieved by TMC, NORI and our partner Allseas over the last few months. So thank you for your interest and attention today. And with that, we'd like to turn it back over to the operator for any Q&A.

[Operator Instructions].

While we're waiting for that one to compile, we might take one of the questions from the chat. When will we release an analysis and evaluation of the metallurgical content, the 3,000 tonnes of nodules collected? I think what's important to keep in mind with those nodules is coming from the NORI-D area, we've actually moved the majority of the resource from inferred to indicated, and then some of it from indicated to measured, it's a very consistent resource in terms of the metal content for a nodule. In fact, this is a rarity if you're going to look at a similar type of deposit on land. But in going from indicated to measured, for those nodules, there's actually an increase of roughly 7% in terms of the resource size for that measured amount. So it is very consistent and we're confident that overall these 3,000 tonnes of nodules are generally similar characteristics to everything else that we've reported in our public filings.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will comes from the line of Dmitry Silversteyn from Water Tower Research.

This is Dmitry Silversteyn from Water Tower Research. Just wanted to follow-up on a couple of comments you made in your presentation. Number one, you talked about the deliverables for 2022. And there's still some blue sort of ongoing item left in the year. Can you talk a little bit of -- I think you mentioned briefly that there were some bottlenecks. But can you expand on that and provide a little bit more granularity on what's going on with those milestones? And when do you expect them to get done now?

Craig, do you want to take that?

Dmitry, you're talking specifically on the milestones with respect to some of the engineering bottlenecks that we had referenced?

Correct. When you talked about sort of the improving or delivering new objectives over the next couple of years. On that slide, you still have some areas as ongoing rather than completed.

So specifically, we had referenced to that some of the engineering capacity for PFS work for RKEF, there's a bit of a bottleneck globally. But we do anticipate being able to move some of that forward in the next couple of months. We did receive proposals to that end in September. So it's moving just a little bit slower than we anticipated. And I think it's also important to remember that for Project Zero, we have a plan for how we're going to build that facility. But there is a lot of RKEF capacity around the world. And there are plenty of places that are sitting somewhat idle, given the fact that Indonesia has banned the export of raw nickel. So we're always evaluating our opportunities, and the cost benefit equation of going to a place where a new site would be built or potentially using RKEF lines through a tolling arrangement. So stay tuned on that over the next couple of months.

And then second question on the post collect -- I guess, a two part question. One, you mentioned that you left about 1,500 tonnes of nodules behind on the floor intentionally. Sort of what's the rationale behind that and how is that going to help with the post collection monitoring, and environmental studies that you're going to be publishing? And secondly, or along those same lines, I think you said that the post collection Phase 3 is going to be going through the end of the year. So when do you expect the results -- the environmental results of your pilot program to be published and made available?

Yes. Well, firstly, on the 3,000 tonnes, one of the purposes of the trial, of course, was to test the harvester, and the other was to test the riser. And so we were successful in both of those, and we actually deemed 3,000 tonnes was sufficient. We think that number will average a little bit higher than that. But because we now have the problem of, well, we have to store them, we have to unload them, we have to put them somewhere, because as part of our exploration contract, we're not allowed to sell them. And so, we debated whether we didn't bring that much home to be honest. And as for the process collector monitoring, that will be done by Christmas. And we will start releasing results in a gradual sense over the coming 12 months. And so we're very keen to get some of those results out, because we've been very encouraged by what we've seen. As I mentioned, we were able to collect all the data we were looking for. And certainly, one of the risks in these campaigns is being able to make sure you can track the plume, because particularly in the mid water, it's a particularly small diluted plume. So, we were very successful at doing that. And we're also very successful at capturing the plume and our visual observations are consistent with those numbers we reported from MIT on a study that they monitored last year. But you can assume we are keen to get those results out as quickly as we can. And there will be many, many dozens of papers that will be published as a result of this work that's been going on, not just during this campaign but over the last years. And obviously it all comes together in our application, but we'll be keen to get that out as soon as we possibly can.

That's great. And then final question just on the cash position. So you did raise $30 million with the pipe investment. You mentioned that you have cash, basically, that'll last here for the next 12 months, at least. There is a possibility that ISA may take longer than July of 2023 to get their final regulations out there. So if you're not in a position to sort of get into production in the second half of 2024, what are the steps you're contemplating to bridge that finance or that capital gap?

Well, it's true that every day, as we deliver more of these milestones, we get more and more inquiry. And, as we mentioned, on the last earnings call and reiterated today, our preference is to be raising our future capital at the asset level. And this is very typical for companies to offer earn-in type arrangements to other more significant companies, whether it's in the mining or the oil and gas industry, where those majors will typically come and earn in to an asset. And the important thing about our project is that we don't need a lot of money to get over that into production hurdle. And for those familiar with the natural resources industry, these capital numbers tend to be many hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. But we already have our first production asset. We already have the Hidden Gem, which will be our first vote for Project Zero. And as Craig alluded to, we think we can come up with a no CapEx solution for the onshore processing side as well. So look, all I can say, Dmitry is we're very encouraged by the conversations that are underway at the moment. And they are all focused on asset level discussions around the NORI area.

Just me just add to it, Dmitry -- yes, well, just a little commentary, Dmitry as well. It is important to keep in mind that this has been a period over the last year plus of pretty expensive project development work. We're talking about nearly really in the past several years, in the high teens in the number of offshore campaigns from NORI. We had a successful pilot pyrometallurgical program, showing that we could turn the nodules into valuable metal that wrapped up at the end of last year. And then this environmental research program that we're reaching the culmination of. We're going to be talking about over $100 million spent on that when all is said and done. So the discreet amount that we have to spend to get into production, that's in line with comment Gerard made last quarter that it's circa $100 million, the additional cash that we need to get into production. But when you're talking about a potential delay, let's say things were delayed a month to three months, whatever you wanted to assume, we're a team of less than 40 people. So we think we could be running this business at maybe $4 million or less per quarter in terms of cash burn, if we have to be in sort of a wait and see mode for a very short amount of time. So we think some of the financial tools that we have at our disposal, we have that $100 million shelf registration statement, we don't want to have to put our hand into that cookie jar and go to that. We'd prefer to raise funds at the asset level. But we think we're in a much stronger position financially, and what it takes to actually keep this business going, given how small our team is and how efficient we run it, really isn't that much per quarter.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Malcolm MacDonald from Bank of America.

Dmitry just nailed my question. So, I mean I really don't have anything else to be honest.

And I'm not showing any further questions in the queue. I would like to now turn the conference back to Gerard for any closing remarks.

There are a couple more -- Gerard, sorry. There are a few more questions in the chatroom I just ping through because we have a little bit more time?

Yes, sure.

Yes. So I guess one question is, we have these 3,000 tonnes of nodules, what’s the plan? What are we going to do with them? Maybe over to you on some of those thoughts.

Yes, so we're not allowed to sell them but we are allowed to turn them into product. And so as we've articulated, we have completed the onshore pyrometallurgical pilot work already. However, there is some scope to engage with more partners, because we now have some additional tonnage partners who are looking to get involved in this industry. And we're also quite enamored with the idea of having some batteries running around the place made from our nodules off the license area. We wouldn't be able to sell them, of course, but we can certainly make them and give them to people. That would be more a marketing issue than anything. Yes. So it provides a fair bit of flexibility for us. Of course, we can monetize them, once we get a license, but until such time that our exploration turns into an exploitation license, they can't be turned into cash.

And I see another question in here from David Larkam at Edison Research. Can you provide some granularity on the cash requirements for the next 12 months? And I think we've addressed that. But one point in particular, it sounds like no further cash is required for Allseas. We did finalize the amounts for that third milestone payment. So wanted to flag that. But we are still now endeavoring everybody's back in shore to work to the final economic agreement for Project Zero with our partner Allseas. We already did lay out earlier this year that roughly $55 million of preproduction spending would be on TMC zone account to get the system ready for production towards the end of 2024. So I would just flag those items. But we're looking very much forward to pushing that relationship forward and making sure that we're able to come up with an economic arrangement that makes sense for everybody on Project Zero.

Okay. Well, with that, I'd like to thank everyone for taking the time to join us on today's call. And we look forward to sharing even more progress on our fourth quarter update, which will be in March 2023. Thank you, everyone.

Thanks all.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.