Hi HotCopperHeads,I had the opportunity to attend the GeoTherm...

Hi HotCopperHeads,

I had the opportunity to attend the GeoTherm 2022 congress in Germany, where Vulcan Energy Resources was showcasing itself to a professional public. It was a geothermal congress, not a lithium congress.

Here are my impressions from my talks with them, I won't go into the numbers and details as they are to be found elsewhere, it's about the vibes:

- They had by far the largest stand, inside and outside the Geotherm hall, by personnel and size. Thus, doing a great effort on sustaining the "social license", the OK from the public to operate.

- Employees looked happy to be part of the company, as I told them I made a good buck on this stock as a shareholder, they told me they all were going to get "stock options" too, as a part of their renumeration plans. There are around 200 - 250 employees working for Vulcan at the moment, mainly engineers.

- Being a geothermal congress, there was a large focus on the wasteheat processing. I asked them why they were focus was on providing homes with district heating and not the more obvious industrial heating-projects near the plant. Their answer was:
- District heating for homes = important for the local politicians, It is Vulcans way to be on good terms with local authorities.
- District heating gets them access to a lot of grant-funding.
- They see district heating as a potential large income source itself.
- In Germany, they position their project to be a geothermal heat project to the public, not mainly as a geothermal electricity nor lithium project as most of us investors see it.

- The person I talked with was not aware of geothermal projects beyond the region where they were operating right now. No expansion plans behind that. Why? They said because off the good lithium conditions on the current location. My conclusion: No focus on geothermal-only plans, weird as they have all the competence.

- They will engineer drillings inhouse and try to become a subcontractor for geothermal projects (= renting out drilling rigs to other geothermal projects)

- I also asked: where is an operational lithium converting plant using the same techonlogy, they could not answer that.

- They don't see a problem in geothermal elektricity vs lithium extraction. I asked them if the one hydrologic flow would not effect the other, as for geothermal a great flowrate is needed, and lithium extraction needs as much lithium atoms as possible. They explained me why the one does not effect the other:
- Sheer size of the acquifer: 3km deep layer from Voguese to BlackForest.
- Viscosity is not a problem: The geothermal/lithium brine is only 10% more dense than normal water. Thus underground flows between production and reïnjection well will not create problems. The brine also mixes itself continiously because of water flowing up and down due to the underground heating process. Hot water + under pressure = less dense = good brines.

The persons I talked to were not investor relations managers or the marketing department, but engineers.

Goodluck with investing everybody!

Link: GeoTHERM (geotherm-offenburg.de)