Relevant Excerpts from Lake Update Webinars, page-86

The topic covered in this transcript is "Where are we taking the process from here towards commercial/industrial scale?"
Sourced from Update Webinar #2 on 28/9/23
Commentary made by Scott Munro - SVP Technology Strategy and Risk

DD: So, saying all of that, maybe Scott, it would be good for you to talk again about the process where you go from here taking this, not only commercial, but taking it to industrial scale. Maybe to remind our shareholders what that entails from where we are today in scaling up.

SM: So, as Jonathan mentioned, we've done this extensive test program. We’ve collected all the data. We've got third parties verifying various components of it, particularly when its proprietary and people are concerned what's behind the curtain. So, we're collecting all of that data - that will be available to support our DFS. The DFS is built on this model. Then the next question people ask is, well, the DFS is a nice engineering document - so “deliverable”. How do you then translate that to the final plan? Again, as I highlighted, the carbonation stream is just open up, known technology. Nothing new. Nothing that we should be concerned about. We can go to the public markets and buy from multiple vendors. With our friends at Lilac, and DLE component, there are obviously proprietary pieces of that equipment. What I would say is that we have done the major scale up on this project. The orders of magnitude scale up has been done when we moved from bench to demo. Our next scale up is about producing multiple modules of the same equipment.

We've had meetings this week with our friends at Lilac and they highlighted the work that they've done as a result of this demo plant work to simplify their supply chain. So, they've gotten rid of as much proprietary equipment as they can and they're trying to use off the shelf supplies that they can get from multiple vendors. Because they've recognised that this isn't about making their equipment bigger, it's about making multiple, repeatable modules for this same equipment. So, they have now re-scoped that design. The largest single scale up they've got left to do is at 3:1 scale up. So less than other magnitudes - we've already done the 10:1 scale ups. Now they’ve got one 3:1 left. Everything else is pretty much the same size as it’s going to be. We're just going to have to repeat and produce multiples of these modules.

So really what I'd say at the moment is, thanks to this demo work, the guys have learned a bunch of lessons on the parts of the kit that they would like to standardise and make available from a wider source of suppliers – they are now planning for that. So, they're going to give us that data when we get the DFS feedback in the next in the next couple of weeks. That will be built into our program and then when we move into FEED and the detailed design in the next 18 months, we'll be ready with a robust execution plan that isn't reliant on proprietary equipment or proprietary suppliers. It's relying on the full open market which means that we can access a wider supply chain to get the best, most commercially viable project that we can have. So, we're trying to not only learn from the science and the numbers that we need for the DFS, we're trying to prepare for that next phase of project execution as we prepare for that.