Ann: Commencement of Definitive Feasibility Study at Big Sandy, page-111

There's a few non-holders hysterical about the company deciding to proceed to a DFS without first undertaking a PFS. I suspect most have little to no understanding of the steps required in undertaking either and what the drivers for each are. It's just something they recall reading somewhere, but it has no basis in Big Sandy or probably anywhere else for that matter.

Paul Lloyd and Brett Rabe have discussed at length the need to undertake a PFS and have concluded this step is not necessary for Big Sandy. Rabe is fresh off completing a PFS for LAC's Thacker Pass project. He has all the models, spreadsheets and cost assumptions made for Thacker Pass by Worley Parsons, the hundreds of pages of capital costs by work code breakdown, the average costs by code of account and all the notes and presentations from the meetings he chaired in undertaking the PFS. He knows every line of the NPV and IRR post and pre tax and at 4 and 7 per cent discount rates. He has all the work-flow diagrams for a range of geological samples and knows the leaching results for various acid concentrations, he knows the costs for mg removal for CAOH2 dosing. He doesn't need to re do any of this for Big Sandy. He just needs to plug the Big Sandy numbers from the Tempe lab into the models used for Thacker Pass. That is, he's doing both steps at once saving time and money and getting Big Sandy into production as soon as possible to take full advantage of the sky-high lithium prices.

But Rabe can't complete this work until the drilling campaign is largely finished. This is why the DFS will be done in parallel with the drilling program. The final DFS still needs a lot of data that can only be obtained from the drilling program including, inter alia, refined Whittle shell graphs, block models, composite and model grades, Whittle sensitivity graphs, geo tech zones, pit shell models, processing plant feed and grade model, ore prep flow sheet, processing plant feed and grade, and most importantly the final undiscounted annual cash flow and the cumulative discounted cash flow models.

People trying to undermine AZL's process mistakenly believe that finance is limited and by causing chaos here they can redirect investment to their own preferred company's project. It doesn't work like this, there's more finance available than projects and all will get funded in my view to meet the huge and growing demand. All in my opinion.