MP Materials Corp. Canaccord Genuity's 46th Annual Growth Conference

Having me again. Of course.

Sure. Yeah. I like that quote, too. I gave him a little bit of crap. Pit contours. Sounds very. The reality, though, is I think we've said pretty consistently there has not been a significant exploratory drilling campaign at Mountain Pass, frankly, for decades. What we have seen within our existing resource and reserve report, and what we file annually, is we very consistently have positive reconciliations on actual results versus what the block model is telling you should be there. Our view has been pretty consistently that when we do undertake a more fulsome exploratory drilling campaign, we can at least fill out those blocks a bit, if not expand what the pit shell ultimately could look like.

We've undertaken an early smaller scale amount of drilling. I think we're seeing exactly what we expected to, which is what Michael is alluding to, is that within the individual blocks of the block model, we believe that very clearly we'll be able to bring more ore into those blocks within the model over time. I'm not going to promise you it'll be this year's S-K 1300, maybe it'll be next year's, but undoubtedly, I think it speaks to the scale and long-term nature of this resource. Mountain Pass has been in existence in some way, shape, or form since the '50s. We are consistently surprised to the upside on how high quality this resource base is.

I think the great thing is that not only are we seeing the ability to bring in more quantity of resource, which would certainly extend the mine life at existing throughputs, but it continues to be extremely consistent in mineralogy, which is something that obviously allows us to maintain the cost structure that we have.

Thank goodness, no. No, we have our mining permit, and whether the mine gets bigger or smaller, that mining permit is still there. I think the great thing, though, is despite having a facility that mining is viewed as dirty, the way that we do it is not. We have a tremendously positive relationship with the regulators and the government within California. I think that what we continue to see is, frankly, an ability to expand the asset base of Mountain Pass. If you go out there today, the amount of cranes that you will see expanding the heavier separation capabilities, the recycling facility that's being added there.

Thinking about stage 1, we've talked about some of these technologies that are generally basic mining technologies that we haven't needed to bring to bear, but we think really make a lot of sense now, ore sorting and things like that, to be able to leverage some of the theoretically lower grade ore and upgrade it before it goes through our process. There's a significant amount of capital going into the ground at Mountain Pass.

Well, look, I think that we continue to believe firmly the mining constraint on the entire business. If you look at the full stream, the mining constraint to continue to grow magnet production in the Western world is access to NdPr.

And so undoubtedly, that presents us with interesting opportunities, including looking at expansion of Mountain Pass. To your point, from an upstream perspective, we have hit 13,500 tons in a quarter on upstream REO production before. And so we have gotten quite close to that 60 number. But I think when we laid out Upstream 60K, we said it will be four-plus years and pretty back-loaded in capital. We got 60%-70% of the way there with very minimal capital and very quickly. But some of the other things that will take us eventually to higher levels, like I laid out, are being brought to bear in 2027 and 2028 regardless, like ore sorting and things like that.