Alex Hanly: Good day, Paul, thanks for having me.
Paul Sanger: Now, to kick things off, Alex, maybe for new investors, can you just provide us a brief overview of the Lithium Universe?
Alex Hanly: Yeah. Lithium Universe recently just came back onto the boards after a re-compliance. The company was originally named Mogul Games Group, ASX Ticker MGG. And Mogul Games earlier this year picked up a suite of projects across Australia and Canada, focused on lithium and rare earths.
Paul Sanger: And during the June quarter, you announced agreements to purchase five lithium projects across Canada and Australia. Can you tell us a little bit more about these projects?
Alex Hanly: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So the project that we have down in Tasmania is called Voyager, and it is a rare earth project right next door to AVX Resource, which have a resource of about 27 million tonnes at the moment. And it’s growing quite rapidly. So that’s quite a large tenure down there in Tasmania. We’ve got a small position, a small lithium project near Bald Hill in Mt Marion. And then the focus in Canada is within Ontario and Quebec. In Margot Lake in Ontario, we’ve got a small project, about 27 square kilometres right next to Frontier Lithium’s Spark and PAK deposits up in the Red Lake district. And then over in Quebec, all of our focus is currently within the Apollo Lithium Project situated in James Bay. And the Apollo Lithium Project, Paul, is situated right in the middle of Patriot Battery Metals Corvette and Winsome Resources Adina Project, within 30 kilometres of both.
Paul Sanger: Alex, I interview a lot of similar sort of companies and this question comes up all the time, and it’s in regards to how are you going with those regulatory approvals and permits for the projects. It seems to be a thorn in most companies’ side, how’s that look for you at the moment?
Alex Hanly: Yeah, no issues from our side, Paul, we’ve in Quebec at the Apollo project we got obviously statutory approvals and First Nation approvals to get on ground for earlier stage expiration and we’ve actually already gone down the process and got approved for a drill permit as well. So, it shows that it’s quite a well-oiled machine over in Quebec. And yeah, we’ve got everything we need to get going.
Paul Sanger: And tell me a bit more, obviously a new company with a new mission, how have the management and operating teams now been finalised?
Alex Hanly: Yeah, that’s right. So Paul, we’ve been casting the net quite widely with our dream team, obviously spearheaded by Iggy Tan, as you know. So, Iggy obviously spent his time, I suppose making a name for himself at Galaxy Resources where he spearheaded that company up to about a $2.5 billion valuation when it was merged with Orocobre (ASX:ORE). Now, during his time he built the first, I suppose fully vertically integrated large-scale mine or refinery project encompassing the development of the Mt Cattlin Project in WA and the Jiangsu Lithium Carbonate Plant in China, which was a big step in the early stages of the lithium industry.
So, we’re in good hands with Iggy and we’ve brought onto the board two key appointments, being Dr Jingyuan Liu. Jingyuan actually built the Jiangsu Lithium Carbonate Plant for Galaxy and continues to consult as an international technical expert for lithium downstream processes. So he’s a great appointment. And finally, Pat Scallan, Pat ran Greenbushes as general manager for 25 years. So we’ve got everything from exploration all the way through to downstream and then final markets. So, we’ve then assembled a very, I suppose, broader team encompassing Terry Stark, former GM of operations with Galaxy. We’ve also got John Loxton who built the Jiangsu Lithium Carbon Plant for Hatch. So, again we’ve got all the different facets covered Paul, and we’re ready to get going.
Paul Sanger: Great. Let’s move on to Iggy, who’s obviously the Non-Executive Chair. Now, Iggy has a grand plan for a concept that the company’s calling the Quebec Lithium Processing Hub. Can you tell us a little bit more about this?
Alex Hanly: Yeah. Definitely, Paul. So, the Quebec Lithium Processing Hub is targeted to really, I suppose, focusing on the current hole which is in the Quebec, or the provincial lithium industry. There’s obviously a lot of exploration attention currently going on in James Bay with Corvette, with Patriot Battery Metals, 109 million tonne resource, and James Bay recent upgrade to 110 million tonne resource. So, in terms of perspective, both of these resources are number one and two, biggest spodumene resources in the Americas, and in the top 10 globally.
So, there’s bound to be more exploration, I suppose exploration success in James Bay, but there’s currently no production or processing within the province itself. So it’s really forcing juniors and explorers to look downstream a lot earlier than what they would’ve had to do before. It’s not as simple as what we’d have in WA where you can sign up a very easy offtake and send that over to China for processing. There was a recent mandated divestment by Sinomine when they had equity within Power Metals Corp and they also signed off the offtake agreement there. So we’re seeing almost like the government’s forcing a downstream solution onto junior miners, Paul.
