Welcome to CEO Insights, I'm Marilyn De Guzman with investingnews.com. I'm speaking with John Wisby, Chairman and CEO of international Lithium. Hi John. Hi, good to see you. So in January your company filed the PEA, the technical report, for the Raleigh Lake Project. Could you talk about some of the major highlights of this PEA? Absolutely. First of all, this was a result of several years drilling in which we did a lot of work with estimating the resource in March last year and then we got it to the PEA stage in in December with the technical report filed to January
and we know we've got quite a significant deposit there and the PEA numbers headline came to.. and bear in mind we have lithium there and rubidium but this is only for the lithium so the rubidium is extra came to to an NPV of $342.9 million Canadian dollars and an internal rate of return of 44% obviously that's... these things are very geared towards what the price assumption is that applies to every company that's in that space but what we were doing here, what was the right price at the time
had we done it 6 months early it would have been a higher number and it may be a lower number now but ambivalous next month so this'll do it it's a pretty interesting size and, just again, that's just the lithium and not the rubidium. So tell me a bit more about that... so that project has rubidium. For investors maybe that are watching, that are not so familiar with that, can you talk a bit about rubidium and some of its applications? Okay, absolutely. Rubidium is an alkalide metal like lithium so you have a periodic table: lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium and then cesium.
so rubidium is more like cesium than like lithium because it's heavier. I mean it's.. lithium is very, very light that's why it's used in car batteries. Rubidium is is heavily used in optical fiber, making high quality optical fiber it can be used almost as a cesium replacement for things like oil well drilling fluid where they use cesium formate actually you could use rubidium formate just the same and it's um it's got a pretty high market price as far as we can see so we've been do we're doing a lot of
research, commissioning a research, on actually how big is the market, it's actually much smaller than lithium it's a very opaque market so not every trade that's done comes into figures and there must be a reason for this high price so that for me is, could be appreciable upside but it's too early to say that in a form that we could file a 43-101 and that's why it wasn't there So what's your plan for the Raleigh project for this year? Well, we're going to do more work towards getting it to the next stage
I mean the PEA reports show we needed capital spend to get to where we could value it where we're producing spodumene concentrate not lithium hydroxide. We have 115 million Canadian dollars, that's quite a lot of money So we're definitely looking for partners for that right now on the right terms as many ways that could be dealth with. At the same time progressing it towards the next stage I'd stress that, you know, what we did was only on 48 thousand hectares for the project.
That doesn't mean to say you can stack up all the numbers by 48, but it means there's upside of the rest of the territory and we do have a bit of exploration of that as well to make make sure we're not leaving with very good deposits over the tail Once you build a processing facility you can even use it for for here for one just two kilometers away and bring it all in So those are the things we're exploring. It's a nice problem to have rather than can we prove there's something there. We know there's something there.
The question is now how to monetize it and then do well, and then once we've done that then there's rubidium with big upside as well. Another recent news that you have come out with is your acquisition for 90% interest in Firesteel. Could you talk a bit more about that why that is an important project? We have an existing resource which we took on called Wolf Ridge which is near Upsala, Ontario and that's only it's only about an hour and half drive from Raleigh lake so it's
somewhere there and we identified through somebody we work with, a copper deposit was very close to that one of the things that we love about Raleigh Lake is the good infrastructure, it's on a major road this is on a major road too. In fact, some with it borders on the major road. Some people have to build a road a hundred kilometers into nowhere to make it possible. We didn't have do anything like that so the geography and the infrastructure is excellent. Copper is copper and of course we don't know how big it is we haven't done all the surveying yet
but it looks like a very interesting one and it's pretty contiguous to all the other working sites we got in Ontario, therefore we don't have to set up a new infrastructure 5,000 kilometres away I think it can assume a future but this is likely to be the stale of a big deposit in Chile or Zambia which we're talking about a 50 year mine life absolutely huge amount although it doesn't have to be to The company has also made the decision to identify Zimbabwe as a, you know, strategic country for
lithium exploration. Could you talk a little bit more about why Zimbabwe? I think there are number of things you look for in a country I don't need to explain to anybody, or any one of your subscribers why Canada because it's A: where we are a Canadian-registered company; B: Canada is a very big place; and C: it's seen internationally as being politacally stable so they wouldn't worry about any of those aspects especially how good is your lithium deposit. Zimbabwe is the number 6 producing country of lithium in the world
That's a good start so we're going to a country which we know has a lot of lithium, which has already produced it, and yet there's quite a bit of the country that hasn't yet been fully mapped or explored In the country there's also gold there's coal, there's copper. There's quite a high employment rate so we pick up good people and there is quite a high work ethic probably higher than in Europe or even Canada yet, because of the troubles and it being a third world country of course the cost base is lower
than that it is in a G7 rank so I would imagine that we would A: find lithium there and that our economics there will be, if we do find it, to scale one would be better than when in Canada or Europe or for the obvious cost reasons Against that we've got country that some might regard as We're at PDAC, obviously you're talking to a lot of potential investors. What do you say to them, what makes International Lithium a compelling investment opportunity at this time? I would say I mean, we've got, firstly,
we've got no debt and a reasonable cash position I plan to keep keep it feasible. that's helpful because you don't want to invest in a company that you you can see going down the bargain in a very short time I'm backed by, we're quite well managed, I hope so that be all stuff and um and we've got interesting deposits and in Ontario and we've got Zimbabwe as well and just a tremendous upside: the sources of revenue: copper, lithium, rubidium Beyond that, we've got a very strong foundation.
Thanks John for your time today Thank you very, nice to see you again. Thanks everyone for watching. Join us again next time for another engaging conversation on CEO Insights.
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