Ivanhoe Electric Inc. Study update

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining the call today to discuss the 2026 preliminary feasibility study for our Santa Cruz Copper Project. Before we get started, please note that today's presentation contains forward-looking statements which could cause actual results to differ. Please refer to the news release and our SEC filings for full details. With us on the call today, we have our founder and Executive Chairman, Robert Friedland. Are we getting this echo on the call, anybody?

A little. You sound good.

Okay. With us on the call today, we have Founder and Executive Chairman Robert Friedland, Michelle Lammers, our Chief Operating Officer, Glen Kuntz, Senior Vice President of Mine Development, and Jordan Neeser, our Chief Financial Officer. At this point, I would like to turn the call over to our Founder and Executive Chairman, Robert Friedland.

Well, good morning to everybody all over wherever you may be. I am in Colorado, reminiscing that we started thinking about a rebirth of mining in the U.S. about 10 years ago. I got together with Eric Finlayson, who ran exploration for Rio Tinto, and we started looking at the Western U.S. And of course, Arizona was always the copper state, having produced about 10% of all the copper that humanity has mined in human history. And we have been working in Nevada and in Utah and in Montana and in New Mexico, and a lot of other places in the U.S. And we have come to this turning point about stage 1, the mining the oxide, which is metallurgically very virtuous at Santa Cruz, west of Casa Grande, Arizona. This is a super high-tech copper mine, very clean and going directly to 99.99% copper cathode.

As I have said several times, I doubt it will leave the state of Arizona. There are 1,400 defense companies in Arizona screaming for this metal, several hundred billion USD of capital investment going into semiconductors, automobiles, and other industries. And we are only located 5 miles west of an electric car company. I think it is very important to understand that with the Strait of Hormuz closed and supply chains stressed, and the incredible amount of copper required to upgrade the American grid and data centers, this kind of mine is in our national security interest, and that is why it has sort of attracted the attention of the U.S. administration.

Robert, we lost your audio.

It did. You're back. Can you just carry on with.

You can't hear me. You're back.

Am I back? There are a couple of very important factors here. The Strait of Hormuz has driven the price of sulfuric acid to the moon, and we will soon find out whether there's further escalation there or whether there's some kind of a peaceful settlement. But this mine uses very little sulfuric acid, and it doesn't need a smelter. This metal is critically important in phase 1. There's a much larger phase 2 to go ahead and develop Texaco and a deeper hypogene sulfide resource here that could make this one of the largest mines in the world. Beyond that, we're extremely confident in the strength of our exploration team. We run a 50/50 joint venture with BHP, which is the Western world's largest mining company.

We also run our own 100% owned exploration efforts, and we are extremely confident that we'll have good news for our shareholders. That's why, starting this week, we're going to be talking about this company. First at the Colorado School of Mines this afternoon, and then at the Denver Gold Forum because we're seeing a lot of gold in our projects, both domestically and in Saudi Arabia. Then in Washington, D.C., at an upcoming event, and soon on Wall Street. I believe these shares are significantly undervalued, deserving of much more attention. It's been a long summer, and the tangible reality that we're going to tell you about here today is only the opening note in a symphony that's taken us 8 or 9 years of hard work to get this far.

But America needs mining companies like this because the management team and the technology we address in the U.S. is quite different than what we would do in Mongolia or in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It's been a long summer. In the U.S., we can use the tangible Can you still hear me?

Can you hear me? I think you've.

Have you lost me? You're good, Robert.