Energy Fuels Inc (UUUU) 2022 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good afternoon. My name is Sylvie, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Energy Fuels Q1 2022 conference call. (Operator Instructions) Thank you. Mr. Moore, you may begin the conference.

Well, thank you, Sylvie, and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining Energy Fuels' Q1 2022 conference call and webcast.

First, we need to apologize. Our President and CEO, Mark Chalmers, is not able to join today's call. He's overseas and, apparently, all international phone connections went down so he -- at his location. So he's not able to join. So again, I apologize, but I'll do my best to be here in his stead.

So we are excited to discuss our Q1 achievements and the extraordinary progress that we continue to make. Before I begin, just please note that you will be controlling the slides in your -- in today's presentation from your own device, and I will endeavor to tell you when it's time to advance to the next slide. Also, we will have replays of this presentation available on our website for two weeks.

So Energy Fuels continues to make remarkable progress on many fronts, and we believe Energy Fuels has emerged as the clear leader in US critical mineral production. Never before has this been more important with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, continuing tensions with China, and skyrocketing demand for the critical elements and materials needed for many of today's clean energy technologies.

I believe people are beginning to understand that the costs of globalization over the past many decades are -- we are paying a price for that. And we have become addicted to cheap. This is fine for certain products, but for many critical minerals and critical materials, we are now realizing that the cost of globalization was simply too high.

It has undermined our economic and national security and made us overly reliant on nations that seek to weaken us. And these nations do not share America's values on environmental protection or human rights. So now, we are beginning to observe, at least, a partial deglobalization by the US government and businesses to regain control of our destiny.

I'll be talking today about the uranium, about vanadium, about rare earths, and also about medical isotopes. But as a result of this deglobalization that we're seeing, Energy Fuels is seeing renewed interest in our products, including the uranium and rare earths we produce, our US-produced vanadium, and our future entrants into the medical isotopes field, which is also receiving significant interest.

The bottom line is that people want more American products. Nuclear utilities are looking to diversify their uranium and nuclear fuel supply away from Russia. And we are there to help them wherever we can.

We are hiring people. We are spending money on new equipment. We are refurbishing older equipment and rehabilitating parts of our existing mines to be prepared for the restart of new production, perhaps as early as late summer.

I'm also happy to announce that just this morning, Energy Fuels finalized a long-term uranium supply contract with a major US nuclear utility with up to 1.8 million pounds of deliveries beginning in 2026 and hybrid pricing that has both market-related and fixed components. We are also working on additional contracts with US nuclear utilities that will underpin our uranium business.

On the rare earth front, people are awakening to America's overdependence on China at the same time that demand for magnetic rare earths, which are needed for electric vehicles and other clean energy technologies, is surging. Energy Fuels is quickly creating non-Chinese rare earths supply chain.

We are separating NdPr oxides in our laboratory at the rate of approximately two kilograms per day, and we are also doing a commercial-scale lanthanum separation at our White Mesa mill, which is resulting in a very high-purity rare earth carbonate product, running nearly 35% of NdPr oxide. Shipments of our high-purity products continues to Estonia, and it cannot be emphasized enough that, in just over two years, Energy Fuels is now commercially producing a more advanced rare earth material than any other company in the United States.

We are also advancing a full scoping study for large-scale rare earth separations at the White Mesa mill at the rate of about 10,000 metric tons of rare earth oxides per year, while progressing our work with nanoscale powders on the rare earth metal front. Finally, our efforts to secure more monazite feeds has never been more advanced than it is today.

On the medical isotope front, we are becoming a part of the global effort to cure and treat cancer. We believe we can play a key role as a US source of radioisotopes needed for targeted alpha therapies. Multiple companies are talking to us about how things might progress here.

With regard to vanadium, prices have been high, up to about $12.50 per pound recently, thought it has dropped down a bit. But we were able to capitalize on a few sales during the first quarter averaging above $11 per pound. So to say that there is a lot going on is truly an understatement.

And finally, people are being beginning to recognize the value of our industry-leading recycling programs, further adding to our ESG story. And we are extremely proud to support local Native American education initiatives, including STEM education and scholarships for middle school and high school students. In fact, we recently agreed to purchase some buses for a Native American STEM initiative in San Juan County near the White Mesa mill.

There will be time for questions at the end of this presentation, I have David Frydenlund, our CFO and General Counsel, and also [Sarah Lukash] in our accounting department, who will join me to answer those questions. So let's jump right in.

Next slide, please. This is a -- I will be making some forward-looking statements in today's presentation, so please review the three slides at the end of this presentation with more information about that. I've already gone through some of this -- next slide, please. I've already gone through some of this, but this slide demonstrates Energy Fuels' main investment initiatives. We are responsibly producing the raw materials needed for the clean energy revolution.

On the uranium front, which is our core business right now, we are the largest US producer of uranium, which of course, is the fuel for carbon-free and emission-free nuclear energy. On the rare earth elements front, we are producing the most advanced rare earth material in the US today. And of course, rare earths are primarily needed for electric vehicles. And estimates are that demand for magnetic rare earths could surge by three to five times in the next 10 years or so.

We are a major producer of vanadium when markets warrant. We produce quite a bit of vanadium back in 2019 and into 2020. Vanadium is used in steel, high-strength alloys, and grid-scale batteries. And as I mentioned before, we did sell some vanadium in the first quarter, which resulted in some good revenues for the company.

On medical isotopes, we are recovering a recovery of radioisotopes used in emerging cancer therapies. And this is from our existing process streams. And what we're doing is that we're just taking all of the valuable elements that we have access to at the White Mesa mill, and seeking to monetize those. There's a lot of very valuable materials that come through this mill and we are uniquely positioned to recover them and put them to good use.

Recycling, we do preserve global resources and help address climate change through our industry-leading recycling programs. And we have a great balance sheet, financial strength and zero debt. As of the end of the quarter, we had about $137 million of working capital, including about $106 million of cash and securities and large uranium and vanadium inventories.

Next slide, we started putting this slide up in the very front of our presentation just because ESG is so important these days. The very nature of our business, uranium, rare earths, vanadium, and recycling is ESG-focused, we believe. Of course, uranium is the fuel for carbon-free nuclear energy; rare earths is needed in a whole host of clean energy technologies; vanadium is seeing interest in grid-scale batteries; and of course, recycling saves the world's resources.

In September of last year, we really made some efforts to try to support the local communities where our White Mesa mill operates, including the creation of a new foundation that demonstrates our commitment to supporting disadvantaged communities near our mill. We've already seeded that foundation with an initial $1 billion cash contribution, and we've committed to providing 1% of annual top-line revenues from the mill to this foundation on a go-forward basis.

And also, I encourage you to review our December 2020 sustainability report. It's actually a pretty amazing document, very detailed, and just goes very deeply into all the various ESG focuses that our company has. Next slide.

So first, I'll start off with uranium. Energy Fuels is the number one uranium producer in the United States. We've been the largest producer since about 2017. This map shows our footprint across the Western United States. The blue star right in the middle, the White Mesa mill, located in -- near the town of Blanding, Utah. That's where -- that is America's largest uranium production facility. And that's where, I believe, all uranium production over the last few years in the United States has occurred.

We also have two in-situ recovery plants in Wyoming and one down in South Texas that are currently on standby. And those could be brought back online relatively quickly and with relatively low capital cost in response to increased demand that we're seeing from US utilities.

Next slide, this slide shows our proven, low-cost, near-term uranium production profile. Up in the upper left, you see our White Mesa mill that is currently producing in production right now. We have about 65 or 70 employees out there.

Our focus recently has been on rare earths that we are in the process of shifting over to uranium production. This is the only conventional uranium mill left in the United States, but it's also where we're pursuing our rare earth element, medical isotope, and vanadium initiatives.

Down the lower left, you can see a picture of our Pinyon Plain mine in Arizona. That is a relatively small, but very high-grade, conventional underground mine located in northern Arizona. It is high-grade with uranium grades on the order of about 1% U3O8. It's fully licensed. It's substantially developed.

And given a go decision, we could have uranium in the can from that mine within about a year and a half to two years. This, we believe, is likely the lowest cost uranium production in the United States today.

On upper right, you see our Alta Mesa project in Texas. You can see these are fully permitted, fully developed projects that could be brought back online relatively quickly, in addition to our Nichols Ranch project down in the down in the lower right.

Next slide, we'd like to show this slide, and we've been showing this now for the last couple of years, to show where most of the US uranium has come -- show who has produced most of the US uranium over the last 15, 16 years. Cameco's projects up in Wyoming in Nebraska produced about 25 million pounds during this time period, though they have mostly shut down by about 2018 to 2019.

But you can see that Energy Fuels assets is in second place on this list. And this just goes to show who the real producers are in the United States. It's into 2006. Again, about 86% of all US uranium produced in the US were from assets that are now owned by Cameco and Energy Fuels. And we firmly believe the companies with proven facilities are the ones that are best positioned to respond to the improved markets that we're seeing today.

This slide shows our market position in the North American space as of a couple of -- as of yesterday. And you can see that Energy Fuels there is in the middle of the pack. But I think it's important to note that while these are all uranium producers or developer -- fairly advanced developers, nobody else has rare earths, vanadium, medical isotopes, or recycling. So we don't actually believe that we have too many peers in the market out there.

Next slide, page 9. Just if you're having -- just to make sure you're keeping up here. So I'm going to shift now to talking about rare earth elements, which is truly a complementary business opportunity for Energy Fuels to our uranium business.

What our rare earths? They are a series of 17 naturally occurring elements on the periodic table. And as you know, they are the building blocks of numerous clean energy and advanced technologies including EVs, wind, energy, batteries, cell phones. There's a whole list of technologies that use rare earth elements. And demand for rare earths is expected to surge in the coming years, primarily due to increased commercialization and deployment of electric vehicles.

And so what we're finding here is that Energy Fuels could be the missing link in rare earth production. Pretty much every major rare-earth-bearing mineral that is mined in the world is radioactive when it comes out of the ground. It has naturally occurring uranium, thorium, and other radionuclides, and that includes the monazite that we're currently focused on.

And the White Mesa mill, we've come to develop over the last couple of years is the only existing facility in North America, possibly outside of China, with the licenses and capabilities able to process monazite for their recovery of rare earth elements. So as I said a couple of times, we are currently in commercial production of the most advanced rare earth material in the US.

It's a high-purity rare earth carbonate, and it is the most advanced material because we have chemically altered it. We have removed the uranium, the thorium, and the other radionuclide. We're recovering the uranium for sale into the US nuclear industry, and we're producing a material that is actually ready for rare earth separation, which is the next step in the rare earth supply chain. No other company in the US is this far down the supply chain as Energy Fuels is.

In March of 2022, we began commercial scale, partial rare earth separation using some existing SX, solvent extraction equipment, that we were not using at the mill. By using six stages of solvent extraction, we've actually been able to pull out a lot of the lanthanum and some of the cerium out of our rare earth carbonate and produce a very, very high-purity rare earth carbonate that is about 32% to 34% NdPr, which of course, are the elements needed for these rare earth permanent magnets in electric vehicles.

Energy Fuels plans to install light and rare earth separation in the next two to three years, with heavy rare earth separation soon thereafter. And we're also evaluating the potential to produce rare earth metals and alloys.

Next slide. So why are we focused on monazite? The bottom line is that it is a superior rare earth mineral and it's already produced in a lot of existing mines. It is superior because it has higher concentrations of the magnetic rare earths needed for EVs, primarily NdPr and also Dy and Tb, dysprosium and terbium.

Also, monazite sand is currently being produced as a low-cost byproduct of heavy mineral sand mines globally. There's heavy mineral sand mining in the Southeast, United States, Australia, Brazil, Africa, and elsewhere. And the main target metals at these mines are zirconium and titanium minerals, ilmenite, rutile, zircon, and that sort of thing. But they also recover monazite sand as a low-cost byproduct.

Most monazite sand is currently being shipped to China to feed their dominant industry that Energy Fuels is seeking to divert a little bit of that to our industry, and make us a global player in rare earth. And again, monazite sand that we're getting from Georgia is very high-grade. Our current feed is about 53% total rare earth oxides.

And again, like I said, the beginning, monazite has much better distributions of the rare earths needed for permanent magnets, about 22.1% NdPr and about 13.8% heavy rare earths. This material that we have has a basket value of a little over $25,000. And this basket value is not counting every element on the periodic table. This is the main commercial products that we could pull out of a ton of monazite.

Typical US bastnaesite ore contains only about 16% NdPr and very few heavies have a much lower basket value. And also, much greater recoveries of the magnetic rare earths are achievable for monazite, which is a phosphate, which is that versus bastnaesite, which is a fluoride carbonate.

Next slide, slide 11, so the White Mesa mill is currently processing monazite from the state of Georgia from mines owned by a company called Chemours. Again, we're the only facility in North America licensed and capable of processing monazite for the recovery of both uranium and rare earth elements.

And again, uranium and thorium are actually problems for most companies. They're not licensed or capable of handling it, so they need to get rid of it somehow. They can dispose of it or they can try to sell it to somebody. And in our case, that's not the case with us. They are actually value adds for Energy Fuels. We can monetize the uranium; we're looking into monetizing the thorium.

The mill is highly scaled -- scalable, we have plenty of capacity for our rare earth element business. We have the current licensed capacity to process about 720,000 tons of ore per year, and we're currently processing about 1,000 tons of monazite per year. That equates to about 0.1% of our annual capacity. Our goal is to process about 10 to 20 or maybe even 30,000 tons of monazite per year. But again, you can see that it's just going to take a fraction of our capacity.

And also relatively, little waste is generated from this initiative. For one, we have small relative quantities to feed -- we talk about 15,000 to 30,000 tons. Also, about half of the feed is recovered as finished product. So that means only half of this feed is actually waste that goes out to our tailings. And the waste streams will use less than 2% of our capacity in our existing state-of-the-art tailings management system.

Next slide. So this is what Energy Fuels has been able to accomplish in just over two years, which we think is pretty spectacular. We've employed a highly capital efficient plan using existing facilities that we've been able to bolt together.

We have already created a US-EU supply chain where we're currently purchasing monazite sand from Chemours in Georgia. We are seeking to purchase additional monazite supply. And we're in advanced discussions with major existing suppliers globally. And I think we're getting very close on a few of these.

We're producing a high-purity rare earth carbonate at our White Mesa mill. We're performing partial separation of lanthanum using existing mill infrastructure, and we're delivering a rare earth carbonate to an existing separation facility owned by Neo Performance Materials in Europe. So you can see we've just bolted together existing facilities and capabilities.

Long term, we plan to create a US centric supply chain where we gather up monazite sand from the US, but also elsewhere in the world. And we do all the processing and refining here in the United States, primarily at the White Mesa mill. And this will create a fully integrated rare earth separation and value-added rare earth capabilities at the White Mesa mill. This will allow us to capture the full value of the rare earth supply chain.

We've expanded our collaboration with Carester, which is the consultant out of France, who's recognized as being the global leader in rare earth separation. And again, I think it's important to note as well that Energy Fuels has produced uranium and vanadium at the White Mesa mill using solvent extraction technology for 40 plus years. And solvent extraction is the main technology used for producing separated oxides -- rare earth oxides.

So it's been relatively easy for us to pivot to producing rare earths using solvent extraction. This is not the -- not a big heavy lift for us. But again, we also know that there's a lot of things we don't know, which is why we've hired the world's leader in rare earth separation, Carester.

Next slide, slide 13. This slide basically shows, just graphically, what the previous slide demonstrated. The top arrow shows our existing supply chain and then the bottom arrows in this flow chart goes where we plan to go in the next few years. And again, I think the -- I mean, it's very obvious that the next natural step for Energy Fuels is to produce separated rare earth oxides, and we are advancing down that path very, very quickly.

Next slide. This next couple of slides shows a few pictures of what we've been able to accomplish. You can see in the upper left, those are super sacks of mixed rare earth carbonate. They are loaded into a container that goes to Estonia.

Lower left, you can see monazite crack and leach occurring in the mill, a monazite laboratory analysis. And then what's exciting there in the lower right, now that's an older picture, but we're performing rare earth separation. I think it's up to about 72 stages, if I'm not mistaken.

So it's grown significantly since this picture was taken, but we're producing about two kilograms of NdPr oxide in the lab right now. Now, that's not very much yet, but we're learning a lot. We're getting some great data. And again, with our collaboration with Carester, we plan to get there.

Next slide, page 15, this is just some more pictures of our people. Again, we're really proud of what we've been able to accomplish here. There's a -- we're a resourceful bunch here, and we've been able to accomplish a lot in a very short period of time.

Next slide, this talks about our collaboration with Nanoscale Powders. And this is a technology development company based out of Boston that is developing a low-cost, low-emission, rare earth metal-making process.

In the end of 2021, we announced a strategic alliance with them. And the purpose is to develop an innovative rare earth metal-making technology that will significantly reduce costs; reduce greenhouse gas emissions; reduce labor; improve safety; and reduce energy used versus traditional metal making.

So we've committed to, I believe, it's $10 million to advance this technology to commercialization, and we'll see where it goes. We have high hopes for this.

Next slide, page 17, I won't go through this whole thing. But there are a number of reasons why we believe that Energy Fuels is going to succeed with rare earths where others have struggled, particularly in the United States.

And I'll just point you out to the right-hand side of this slide that it's been widely recognized that monazite is a great source of rare earth elements. The problem with monazite is it is more radioactive than other rare earth elements. Now they're all radioactive. But monazite is more radioactive simply because it has more thorium and uranium and other radionuclide.

Well, Energy Fuels has solved this problem in the last year or so, and this is an exciting thing. So we've basically just unlocked the potential of monazite to be able to supply a great, new US rare earth supply chain.

Next slide. This shows our market position in the rare earth space. Again, we don't believe that we have much in the way of peers, but you can see how we stack up against others that are out there.

Next slide, say a little bit about vanadium. Again, this is another critical mineral produced by Energy Fuels used in steel, high-strength alloys, aerospace, chemicals, and also these emerging grid-scale battery technologies that you would use to store renewable energy. It is a critical mineral in the US and Canada, and the White Mesa mill is a significant producer of vanadium as a byproduct of our uranium production.

Back in 2019, 2020, we produced about 1.9 million pounds of high-purity V2O5 at the mill. And we -- like I said, we did sell, I believe, about 250,000, 280,000 pounds of V2O5 in the first quarter. And we have about 1.4 million pounds left in inventory. Today's price is about $10.75, so it has come off a little bit from its recent highs. But again, with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, there's a good chance that vanadium prices are going to remain elevated because Russia is a major global producer of vanadium. And again, V2O5 prices are up about 100% since the first part of last year.

We also have some readily available vanadium that we could recover in our tailing solutions on the order of 1 million to 3 million pounds. So if we sell out on this inventory, we'll be able to replace it in relatively short order.

Next slide talks a little bit about medical isotopes from thorium and also from radium. We have engaged in an alliance with a company called RadTran, based here in Denver, for the recovery of isotopes needed for new cancer therapies. We are in a strategic alliance with them.

And the whole point here is to create a supply chain for the medical isotopes primarily needed for targeted alpha therapy cancer therapeutics, which are definitely therapies for cancer. But we've even heard some people say that it could be a cure for some cancers.

So alpha-emitting isotopes are in short supply. Major pharmaceutical companies are studying targeted alpha therapy and advancing with the FDA and also around the world. And again, the objective is to treat cancer on a cellular level while minimizing damage to surrounding healthy tissue.

This could become a relatively significant revenue generator for Energy Fuels. It might take a few years to get there, but we're very excited about this and look forward to telling you more about our advances in this realm.

Next slide. Uranium recycling, this is another part of our project -- a part of our business that we're very proud of. We're saving the world's resources and reducing carbon emissions. We recycle alternate feed materials that contain recoverable quantities of uranium and vanadium that would otherwise be lost to direct disposal. It reduces the need for mining and reduces carbon emissions.

And again, there's some great stats here on this slide, but also in our 2020 sustainability report, that shows the comparisons of the 6 million pounds that Energy Fuels has recovered during the last 15 or 20 years or so. It has really made a material impact on the environment. So again, no other uranium or rare earth company anywhere in the world has similar recycling programs than Energy Fuels.

Okay. Wrapping up here with the last couple of slides, this slide here shows the financial strength and flexibility that we have here at Energy Fuels. We have about $135 million of cash, securities, and inventory, almost 700,000 pounds of uranium inventory, plus quite a bit of uranium in inventory that we could process in relatively short order from stockpiled alternate feed materials and also ore that we're getting from some mine-cleanup work.

And again, we have about 1.4 million pounds of vanadium in inventory. And it's good to note as well that the uranium -- I'm sorry, the inventories that we're -- values that we're carrying on our books is actually significantly lower than today's prices.

And this -- the upper right part of the slide gives a representation of what that looks like where we're currently carrying our uranium on the books at about $23.79, but the current price is about $50. It's probably come down a little bit, might be closer to $48 or $49 right now. But still, it's quite a bit higher than $23.79.

Also, we're carrying our vanadium at about $5.36, while today's price of $10.75. Down the lower left is our 2022 guidance. We expect to produce about 100,000 to 120,000 pounds of uranium. We expect to have about 800,000 pounds of uranium in inventory at year end. Assuming that we don't sell any of our inventory into expanding -- improved markets, we're going to have to evaluate that.

We're holding our inventory for sale into long-term contracts that we're in discussions with right now. But if the price does get to levels that are attractive, we would certainly evaluate selling some of that. And we also expect to produce about 650 to 1,000 tonnes of mixed rare earth carbonate, though again, we're in discussions to get some more monazites so those numbers could change.

You can see our recent share prices is about $6.52 as of yesterday. We've come off of our recent highs, just I think due to general mark-up weakness. But again, everything is going as planned here at Energy Fuels, and we're pushing ahead with some really exciting initiatives.

Last slide, next slide, number 23 here. This is just the summary of what I've been talking about today. Energy Fuels does provide exposure to several critical materials needed for the clean energy revolution. Whether you're talking about electric vehicles; whether you're talking about carbon-free electricity; whether you're talking about wind energy, computers, electronics, military applications, you need raw materials to make those happen. And Energy Fuels is producing many of those raw materials here in the United States to the highest global standards for environmental protection and for human rights.

So again, on uranium, we do have an unmatched ability to quickly increase low-cost uranium production from proven assets. We have more production facilities, more capacity, and more experience than any other US company.

On rare earths, we're producing mixed rare earth carbonate, which is a product more advanced than any other company in the United States. And we're performing commercial scale separations.

On the vanadium side, we have a lot of inventory and we've been selling into recent market strength, so that could be a source of revenues here for this year. Medical Isotopes is -- we're making progress on that. Again, recycling is a great part of our ESG story, and we have financial strength to achieve our business plans here.

So again, Energy Fuels is producing the raw materials needed for many of today's clean energy and advanced technologies in the US and to the highest standards, that cannot be emphasized enough. So again, I thank you all for your time and I'll be happy to -- we will be happy to answer any of your questions. Thank you very much.

(Operator Instructions) Heiko Ihle, H.C. Wainwright.

Hi, everyone. This is Nate calling in for Heiko. Thanks for taking our questions today. In your release, you state that financial entities purchasing uranium on the spot market to hold for the long term have the potential to result in higher sustained spot and term prices, and perhaps induce utility center into more long-term contracts with non-Russian producers like Energy Fuels.

So for what it's worth, you know, we fully agree with that assessment. We've been saying this in our reports pretty much since the Russian invasion started. Now kind of building on that, you have a much clearer path with utilities than we do.

In a general sense, can you talk a little bit about their fears and concerns and more importantly, a bit as to how willing they are to accept slightly higher pricing to ensure geopolitically safe supply?

Sure. And thanks, and hey, very nice to meet you. So yeah, we are definitely seeing that. Now, I wouldn't say that they're calling us up in a panic or anything like that. That's not the case. I mean, look, these US utilities are already very well diversified. They have already managed a lot of their risk in a reasonable manner.

However, they do get a lot of their uranium supply and nuclear fuel supply from Russia. I believe it's 20% to 25% of the enriched uranium used in US nuclear power plants comes from Russia, about 50% comes from Russia -- the uranium comes from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.

And again, I think I heard somebody say at one time that Russia has basically shown themselves to not be a responsible player in the global nuclear market. I mean, they were attacking nuclear power plants.

I think that utilities have a desire to shift away from there. And so I think that it's mostly contributed to higher prices in the market.

And so are they willing to -- are utilities willing to pay higher prices? Yes, certainly these are the Russian supply, but that could apply to Canadian supply, Australian supply, and Namibian supply, or whatever kind of supply. But the prices that you're seeing right now are certainly bolstered both by intermediary buying like the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust, even purchases by uranium producers. But also, I think utilities are seeking non-Russian supply. So yeah, that's what we see going on right now.

That's great. Thank you. Appreciate that insight. And just one more question. We know you're not planning on any Canadian production this year. But just a follow-up question to that point. What is the market price at which you'd flip the switch, so to say, and how long do you think these kinds of price would need to be sustained before your board and you would be willing to do so? Clearly, your costs are pretty favorable when you're looking at current market pricing.

Yeah. Well, the way -- what we're doing right now is we're pursuing what we call the Union Carbide plan, which is what a company called Union Carbide did back in the '60s, '70s, and '80s where vanadium prices have always been very spiky. And it's really hard to trying to predict it and really hard to trying to build production around it.

And so what Union Carbide would do and what we are also doing is you build up an inventory of vanadium that is ready to sell. This is finished vanadium product that's ready to sell when that spike happens, because these spikes can be very short-lived. And so what we do is we have that vanadium ready to sell, which is what we did in 2019, 2020. The opportunity to sell some came this year, we sold some, we hope to sell more.

And what it allows us to do is it allows us to replace that inventory on our own schedule, on our own timing. And so we might produce a little bit more vanadium later this year or we might produce it in the next year. We're still evaluating that right now. We still have plenty of vanadium to sell into future spikes.

You can see the prices that we're willing to sell at, well, we've sold some. We sold for an average price of about $11 per pound. And so our plan with a lot of the stuff is to sell into the curve, sell as the price goes up that you can never call the top.

And so that's just a good way to try to maximize your exposure while not just selling it all for too low or too low over price or missing the piece. So I hope that answers your question.

Yeah, that's great. Thanks, Curtis. That's all from us and nice to meet you as well.

Yeah.

(Operator Instructions) Mark Reichman, Noble Capital Markets.

Thank you. Curtis, I want to take you back to your comments about the uranium supply contract. The numbers were kind of coming quick, and I want to make sure I got them right. Did you say 1.8 million pounds a year deliverable starting 2026 under hybrid pricing?

That is correct, up to 1.8 million pounds. The base quantity is -- would be 1.5 million pounds, but there is some quantity flexibility. So it is up to 1.8 million pounds. And yes, deliveries would begin in 2026, and it is hybrid pricing.

We're working on some additional contracts, which would have deliveries sooner than that. But we're building our book. We're seeing prices right now that justifies entering into contracts with -- we're not going to sell all of our production into contracts like this or these prices. But we see an opportunity to start building up a book of contracts here.

And I know you've given some production guidance on uranium for 2022, but should we anticipate a ramp up in production and inventories as we get closer to 2026 then?

Well, yeah. So -- depending on how this -- our contract book builds out, we'll have to evaluate what we do with our existing inventories; what we do with production. And contracts may also allow us to purchase on the open market and make a margin.

So yeah, I think we are certainly looking to -- looking into what it would take to get some of our projects going. We haven't made a final decision on which projects we'd get going. But yeah, that's -- it's -- more to come on that.

And then bigger picture, if we really see things start to take off here, the question being you've got so much capacity at the White mills, but at what point would you really start to think about bringing some of the ISR plants on? Is there an importance in diversification, or is it a cost issue, or when would you get to the point to really be thinking about that?

Well, I mean, we're looking at it right now, of course. But yeah, I mean, we have to just -- yeah, we just have to evaluate what projects to bring on as we decide to ramp up. And again, the contract booked will dictate a lot of that. We have to be conscious about what kind of production we would have available from our projects to deliver into the contracts to make sure that we can meet our obligations. And of course, cost comes into that as well.

But whether it's Pinyon Plain; whether it's La Sal; whether it's alternate feeds at White Mesa; whether it's Nichols Ranch; Alta Mesa; they all have cost structures that are attractive at today's prices, or at least close to today's prices, the prices that we're seeing in -- available in long term contracts. So yeah, I'll just leave it at -- we're currently evaluating our options.

Okay. Thank you so much, Curtis

Yeah, you're welcome, [Mike].

Thank you. And at this time, Mr. Moore, we have no further questions. Please proceed.

Okay. Well, I want to thank you all again for joining us today. Again, I apologize for Mark not being able to join. Hopefully, he gets back in touch here in the next few hours. But as always, please feel free to call me or Mark. And yeah, we've got some exciting things going on here at Energy Fuels, and there's going to be a lot more to come. So again, I thank you and have a good rest of your day.

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, this does indeed conclude your conference call for today. Once again, thank you for attending. And at this time, we do ask that you please disconnect.