Altius Minerals Corporation Aktie

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Altius Minerals Annual and Special Meeting 2026 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Wednesday, May 13, 2026. And I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Emily Jieam. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Ina. Good afternoon, and welcome to our Annual and Special Meeting call and webcast. This is being recorded, and you can ask questions during the Q&A. The slides will start after the opening remarks and business of the meeting from our Chair, Fred Mifflin. We will inform those on the call when the Q&A is starting. The presentation will be given by Brian Dalton. And with that, I will hand it over to Fred Mifflin, Independent Chair.

I'd like to call the meeting to order. Welcome to our 29th Annual Meeting of Shareholders. My name is not John Baker. I'm Fred Mifflin, Chairman of the corporation. And in accordance with the corporation's bylaws, I'll act as Chairman of this meeting. Shareholders have been given the option to attend this meeting in-person or by conference call or webcast. Let me first address those persons not here in-person, joining by webcast or conference call.

The webcast allows participants to hear the meeting, but it's listen-only. So if anyone viewing the webcast would like to ask questions either during the formal part of the meeting or after Brian Dalton's presentation, you should dial into the conference call as all questions are received there. The phone number for this is shown on our website. For those on the webcast or that have dialed in and would like to view Brian's presentation, you can find it on our website. From the homepage, go to Investor Information at the top of the page, click on AGM on the drop-down. This contains the proxy and information circular documents for this meeting and today's presentation.

Before we begin, I'll take this opportunity to introduce Altius' senior management team in attendance today, and I'd ask that they stand and be recognized. Brian Dalton, Chief Executive Officer and Director; John Baker, President; Stephanie Hussey, Chief Financial Officer; Mark Raguz, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development; Lawrence Winter, Vice President, Generative and Technical; Flora Wood, Vice President, Investor Relations and Sustainability and another title that you'll hear about later; and Ernie Ortiz, the latest addition to our team, Vice President, Corporate Development and Head of Lithium.

Members of our Board of Directors are also in attendance today as we just concluded our quarterly directors meeting here in St. John's yesterday, and I'd like to ask that they stand and be recognized as well. Nicky Adshead-Bell -- Nicole Adshead-Bell, Teresa Conway, Andre Gaumond, Roger Lace and Jamie Strauss. Our other Director, Anna El-Erian, is unable to attend today due to other commitments.

I'd like to note for the record and acknowledge a number of significant changes to the executive ranks since we met at this meeting a year ago. John Baker has moved into the role of President, and we're very fortunate to continue to benefit from John's wisdom and wise counsel. Stephanie Hussey has assumed the role of Chief Financial Officer, having previously served as the Vice President of Finance for the past 12 years. Mark Raguz has assumed the responsibilities of Senior Vice President, Corporate Development; Flora Wood, in addition to her responsibility -- her role as Vice President of Investor Relations and Sustainability, Flora has taken on the additional responsibilities of Corporate Secretary. And most recently, we're pleased to welcome Ernie Ortiz as Vice President, Corporate Development and Head of Lithium on the acquisition of Lithium Royalty Corporation earlier this year.

Shareholders will be reassured to know that Brian Dalton has not taken on any new responsibility and continues to lead the corporation as the CEO, as does Lawrence Winter as Vice President, Generative and Technical. So that is the -- those are the changes to the management ranks over the years -- over the year.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to formally acknowledge and thank 2 former members of our senior management team for their incredible contributions to Altius over the past many years, and they're here this afternoon, and I'd like them to be recognized. Ben Lewis, our former Chief Financial Officer and Chad Wells, our former VP, Corporate Development, Project Generation and Corporate Secretary for over the past 23 years. And it's also reassuring that they're wearing their Altius gear this afternoon.

So I now formally appoint Flora Wood, our Corporate Secretary, as scrutineer for the meeting and also as Secretary for the meeting. The notice calling this meeting and all proxy-related materials were mailed to shareholders on April 10, 2026. A quorum for any meeting of the shareholders is 2 persons present, representing at least 25% of the shares entitled to vote at such meeting. I have the scrutineers' preliminary written report on attendance showing that 40,891,496 shares are represented at this meeting by persons present and represented by proxy being 73.1% of all outstanding shares. This meets the quorum requirement for the meeting. And if anybody has seen voting results recently, they know the 73% turnout is fantastic. So we've got a very engaged shareholder base.

Notice of the meeting having been given and a quorum being present, I declare this meeting to be properly called and constituted for the transaction of business. Our bylaws permit a shareholder to participate in a meeting by means of telephone or other communications facilities, but do not permit voting to take place other than in person or by proxy. Any registered shareholder or proxy holder present in-person or by telephone may demand that a ballot be conducted on any motion put before the meeting, but unless a ballot is demanded on any motion for expediency, I will conduct all votes by a show of hands of those persons present in-person. In order for the meeting to flow efficiently, I've asked certain Altius officers to move and second all resolutions.

I now submit and formally receive the corporation's financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2025, and the auditor's report on those statements as mailed to shareholders requesting the same on April 10, 2026. The first item of business is the appointment of an auditor for the coming year. As you will see from the information circular, management is nominating the firm of Deloitte LLP as auditors to hold office until the next annual meeting or until their successor is appointed and to authorize the directors to fix their remuneration. Deloitte has been the corporation's auditor since 2026. Do I have a motion for this item of business?

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Mr. Chairman, it gives me pleasure to move that Deloitte LLP be appointed the corporation's auditor to hold office until the next Annual General Meeting and that the corporation's directors be authorized to fix the remuneration to be paid to the auditor.

Ernie?

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you both. Is there any discussion? If not, I ask for a vote on the motion by a show of hands. I remind you that you cannot vote against the resolution. Your choice is to vote in favor of the motion or to withhold your vote. All those in favor? Anybody opposed? I declare the motion carried.

The next item of business is the election of directors for the coming year. The Board has fixed the number of directors to be elected at the meeting at 8. May I have nominations for directors?

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to nominate the following for election as directors for the next year: Nicole Adshead-Bell, Teresa Conway, Brian Dalton, Anna El-Erian, Andre Gaumond, Roger Lace, Fred Mifflin and Jamie Strauss.

Mr. Chairman, I second the nomination.

Thank you. As was stated in the information circular, these 8 persons are management's nominees for election to the Board. Our advanced notice bylaw requires that any person proposing to nominate a director for election must provide the company with advanced notice and prescribe details concerning any proposed nominee. As no advance notice has been given in accordance with this bylaw, we may now proceed directly to the election of directors.

The Board has adopted a policy stipulating that any nominee proposed for election as a director who receives based on the shares voted at the meeting in-person or by proxy, a greater number of shares withheld than voted in favor must tender his or her resignation to the Chairman of the Board to take effect on acceptance by the Board. 8 persons have been nominated to fill the 8 directors positions. Do I have a motion for this item of business?

Mr. Chairman, I move that the 8 persons who are nominated for election as directors be elected the corporation's directors for the next year to hold office until the next Annual General Meeting and that shareholders authorize the election of the 8 nominees by a single resolution.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion? All those in favor? Anyone opposed? I declare the motion carried.

The next item of business is to consider and if acceptable, pass an advisory resolution on the corporation's approach to executive compensation known as the say-on-pay resolution, the details of which are set out in the management information circular. As noted in the circular, the corporation believes that its compensation objectives and approach to executive compensation appropriately align the interest of management with long-term interest of shareholders.

Under our say-on-pay policy, we provide shareholders the opportunity to cast an advisory vote on the corporation's approach to executive compensation at each annual meeting. This policy reflects our ongoing efforts to meet the highest governance standards and to ensure a high level of shareholder engagement. The Board, with Mr. Dalton abstaining, unanimously recommends that shareholders vote in favor of the advisory resolution as set forth in the management information circular. Do I have a motion to this effect?

Mr. Chairman, I move on an advisory basis and not to diminish the role and responsibility of the Board that the shareholders accept the approach to executive compensation disclosed in the management information circular.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion? All those in favor? Anyone opposed? I declare the motion carried.

The next item of business is to consider and if thought appropriate, to pass with or without variation, an ordinary resolution known as the LTIP resolution in the form set out on Page 22 of the management information circular for this meeting, approving the renewal of the corporation's omnibus long-term incentive plan and specifically the approval of all unallocated options, rights and other entitlements under the plan and all other ancillary matters set forth in the LTIP resolution. The Board unanimously recommends that shareholders approve the LTIP resolution. Do I have a motion to approve the resolution?

Mr. Chairman, I move that the LTIP resolution be approved by adopting the full text of the resolution set forth on Page 22 of the management information circular for this meeting.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

Thank you. Is there any discussion? All those in favor? Anyone opposed? I declare the motion carried. We've now concluded the formal business of the meeting. Is there any other matter a shareholder wishes to raise? For these purposes, I would ask the conference operator to open the phone lines.

[Operator Instructions]

I think that, that is the part of the meeting that will receive questions after Brian's presentation. Is that right, Flora?

Yes.

Yes. So we'll do that again. I guess, is there any question on the formal part of the meeting?

Okay. I will entertain a motion that the meeting be terminated.

Mr. Chairman, I move that the meeting be terminated.

Mr. Chairman, I second the motion.

All those in favor? Anyone opposed? I declare the motion carried and the formal part of the meeting terminated.

Now I'm going to pass the floor over to Brian for what is the exciting part of the meeting for his annual presentation, and we will then have a question period at the end. And I would just say anybody on the phone or on the website, you will see Brian's and you can follow Brian's presentation by going to the website, as I mentioned at the beginning of the meeting. Brian?

Hello, everyone. Thanks for coming out. Lots of familiar faces, some we haven't seen in a couple of years back with us. It is pretty exciting. But it's nice to be here and in our 29th year, so I'm not going to pass off an opportunity as a Habs fan to honor the fact that in this past year, Ken Dryden passed away, and this is our 29th year. So I think Fred had handed out some really important honors earlier, but we've got to complete the list. I also made it a mandate, we got -- might have some more turnover coming off in the business in the next year because I decided that you have to be a Habs fan to maintain I don't know if that's considered discriminatory or what not here.

Okay. Well, it was a pretty good year. Not too bad at all is really how I would describe it. When we're here last year, there was a lot of talk about Silicon project and the new gold discovery that AngloGold Ashanti had made, and we were talking about how transformational this could be for the business. I mean while we were here talking, I think we were -- as a management team and a Board already knew what our plan was going to be, and that was to test the market and to see what kind of interest we might muster up from -- particularly from the precious metals royalty companies.

Well, that effort continued on. The prospect generation team, PG team did an incredible job of showing the market just how important and how much potential that royalty represented. And the culmination of that was transactions that happened through the course of the year that generated almost $500 million in proceeds to Altius, while we still maintained a 1/3 interest in the long-term upside of the asset. And that long-term upside actually got another boost over the course of last year in that we concluded quite an arduous arbitration process that confirmed the extent of that royalty to almost 200 square kilometer area around the initial discovery area.

So very early days for that district, and it's nice to have a huge land position attached to the royalty that we've that we retained an interest in. So that was -- that kept us busy well into, I would say, August. But now, of course, that brings us to looking at ourselves and saying, we got an awful lot of money in this company. Why are we going to do with it? And so we switched gears pretty quickly. And by the end of the year, we'd announced 2 different transactions that saw us deploy some of that capital and convert it into longer-term streams of revenue and cash flow. So the most meaningful of that would have been the acquisition that was announced in December of Lithium Royalty Corporation, which is when Ernie came aboard with us. Ernie was the CEO of the company at the time.

So that was an important, really important step and it directly follows on really from the divestiture of the partial interest in silicon. And then also during the year, we did increase our interest in Labrador Iron Ore Royalty Corporation to gain more exposure to royalties at the IOC mine in Labrador. A couple of other highlights, I suppose, that I'd like to highlight here. But for the 10th year in a row, we were able to increase our dividend. So that total increase now is about 400% over for that period of time, and it stands today at about $0.40 a share. We reduced our debt with some of the cash proceeds. We reduced that by 20%. Something I'm particularly proud of, and I know the whole team is proud of, is that we extended the track record of maintaining greater than 20% annual compounded share price growth per year out to 29 years now. So that's a record we're obviously really, really proud of, again, rest in peace, Ken Dryden.

And yes, so going in now to the rest of the presentation, the other thing that was achieved last year is that I think we solidified a go-forward near-term royalty revenue growth outlook that I think is probably the leading trajectory of any of the major royalty companies in the space right now. I ran through -- I put this slide up for the Board in the Board meeting yesterday and joked I said I think this is all we need to do, just put this up, drop the mic and get off the stage shows over then. I don't have enough sense for that though, so I'm going to keep going on. But what this shows you is that over the next 5 years, there is considerable revenue growth that's embedded into our business. And this has been building steadily and steadily.

Some of it is obviously been helped along by prices that have improved over the past couple of years. But really what's more important is how those prices and the cash flows of operators and sentiment in the market are now driving decisions by operators of projects that we hold royalties on to make those investments, to commission expansions of their operations and to basically to grow out our royalty revenue. So again, that's really -- the part that you're seeing right here, this revenue deals with ramp-ups of existing mines, expansions and commissioning of new builds. This is obviously a very healthy growth record. That's more than 3x revenue over the next 5 years that we're anticipating. But what I really want to say here is that, that's the appetizer.

In my mind, the main event is what comes behind that. That's when some really heavy royalties in our business that we've been working on, in some cases, for as much as 20 years, we expect those to start to come on and make contribution. Obviously, not as much visibility on timing and scale. But if you just look at that far right side of this slide here, you'll see that why we can be pretty optimistic about how not just the next 5 years, but how the next decade and decades ahead are shaping up for this business now.

One of the areas I wanted to spend a little bit more time on today, and we did this with our conference call this morning as well, is just to bring people a little better up to speed on what's going on with the electricity royalties part of our business. Many of you will know that we founded this business back in 2019 when we partnered up with Frank Getman and his team in New Hampshire. And the whole idea was -- it was a bold one. It was to try to see if we could bring the royalty model to a whole new natural resource sector to a sector that at that point in time didn't really have an established royalty component. I won't go through the reasons and the back story, but that's an equal in and of itself.

I think really the point I just want to make is that 7 years on now, if you look at the bottom pie chart here and you just look at the amount of electricity generation that is subject to royalties within this business right now, that the objective has been successful. We had no idea if the royalty finance model will be adopted by the players, the main operating players within that space. That was the real challenge. We knew we were drawn to the idea of putting royalties on perpetual natural resources. That made lots of sense to us and really goes to our DNA we've established as a business over the years and trying to tag royalties to ultra-long life resources. And of course, these are perpetual. But the question was, would it take hold? Would it be adopted and would it get off the ground.

So there's a few ways I think you can establish -- I can establish credibility in saying that, yes, this business is now a real one and that royalties are a real thing in the renewable energy sector. So this slide basically shows the counterparty. So these are the people that are paying us now royalties through this business. And they include some of the biggest, most established names in power, energy and infrastructure really in North America, including NextEra Energy and Enbridge. So these are the people that who would not have heard of royalties within their capital structures 6, 7 years ago who now write a check every quarter to Altius.

And yes, so a lot happens over that period of time. There's 2 ways this royalty business has been built up. One has been through backing early-stage developers and attaching royalties to projects before they sell them on to end operators. So that's been a lot of how we've done that. But then also been able to put royalties on more advanced stage projects by putting capital right to the operators and developers and earning royalties that way. But the sum total, and so it's categorized here, what you see now is that after 5 or 6 years of pretty intensive development work that things are really starting to happen. And a lot of those early-stage royalties, in particular, are coming out the back end of pipelines, commissioning as operating projects, producing electricity and paying those royalties.

Yes, very -- I think this is a very impressive outlook. But I will also say here that the business is now established. It has been adopted within the broader renewable sector. The challenge for it now is to really bring on and add scale and add further diversity. And I think that it's actually got -- it's just at that point that we can really start to achieve on that objective now going forward with the base built and the credibility and relationships all established.

So yes, that really goes to then what's ahead for this business. And I do think that it's at a launch point, quite frankly. The backdrop for its opportunity set going forward is really, really bullish power demand in the U.S. That's the key. There is a level of demand that's emerged for electricity in that market that hasn't been seen really in probably a generation since close to the end of the second world war since we've seen this kind of broad-based demand for power and electricity coming forward. So that's a great starting point. There's a clamoring of -- for new projects to come on and obviously, lots of capital that's going to have to be raised to build those projects will create really good starting point conditions.

What I find really interesting, almost enigmatic about the conditions that we're seeing right now. So you've got that incredibly bullish backdrop. And you would normally associate conditions like that with very competitive capital conditions, competing with lots of other forms of capital, all trying to get on board this raging bull market. But it's actually pretty tepid. The competing forms of capital we're seeing in the market are relatively subdued. There's some interesting reasons for that. I think they're almost more political than they are economic in a lot of ways. It's probably no small secret that there's been a fairly adversarial relationship between the renewable energy sector and the U.S. administration, the more recent U.S. administration.

And generally speaking as well, I think the pendulum has swung back a bit around investment mandates, ESG-focused investment mandates in the more -- in the broader global capital markets. So those combination of things has meant that despite the bullish fundamentals, it's not wild and crazy out there on the ground if you're trying to put capital to work. And the GBR team accordingly is finding really, really good returns for advanced stage relatively low-risk projects. And when I say low risk, one of the things that features there is the price you can achieve right now on a long-term contracted basis, if you've got a renewable energy project that's ready to build, you can walk into just about anybody and get really strong pricing on a long-term basis. So I mean that's the kinds of projects that we're bringing our capital into. These are projects that have basically prices locked down at great terms. So anyway, I'm really optimistic about what this business can achieve over the next number of years with this set of conditions and to really build on that revenue profile that we just showed.

Switch over now to base metals. So good, steady growth coming here as well, and that's more of the kind of stuff I talked about at the outset in terms of operators doing better and wanting to invest in their assets. So there's 2 legs that we think will come within the sort of early 4- to 5-year time frame. One is well along with the Curipamba project expected to start production next year. So that's going to bring a lot of copper and actually some gold exposure into the business. We're expecting Lundin to sanction the expansion of operations at Chapada by introducing new ore from a high-grade discovery they've made called Saúva. That should give us a nice boost.

And then looking a little further out, there's some other opportunities as well. We're hearing rumblings from Vale now for the first time in a long time around potential expansion potential at Voisey's Bay. And then a project that you would have heard about previously, but this is a new incarnation of it at Gunnison, where we hold a royalty published some early study results not too long ago that actually looked pretty attractive. And in this iteration, it's a fairly traditional looking operational plan that's being advanced. So we're watching that one fairly optimistically right now as well.

So that basically gives you a sense of how we see in that near-term time frame revenue coming in from the base metal side of things. When we show our base metal revenue these days, we talk often in terms of both base and battery metals. So now that brings us a little bit into lithium. And I think definitely because it's -- this will be the first AGM that we've come together that we're talking about since we've consolidated the new Lithium Royalty Corporation acquisition into the business. And it's actually mind-blowing to me that this was only in December that we announced it and just how much has happened with that portfolio and with that sector in that very short period of time.

So this is the lithium market. So the first thing you're going to see here is that this is a commodity that price tends to be really, really, really volatile. It's a relatively nascent industry, but it's an industry that's really taking on scale. The dollar value of lithium traded in the world has changed dramatically in the past 5 to 7 years as lithium-based batteries have become far more ubiquitous in many elements of our lives. But again, quite volatile sector. We made the acquisition or announced the acquisition of LRC back in December. You see that point on the chart here. And here we are 5 short months later.

And in that period of time, we've seen the lithium price double. So we would have shown charts with revenue expectations from the LRC portfolio back in December at the time when we were explaining the transaction. And we've since updated those and things have moved considerably upwards in that period of time. But you can see here that there are several mines that are just coming on right now and in the middle of ramping up. So there's a pretty steep trajectory that we're seeing ahead for royalty revenue coming in here, but it's -- I think what's really marked here is that the total numbers that we're seeing in this next time frame here, just the scale of what we're talking about, this would be nearly twice what we would have imagined even at the time of the acquisition, which if all that holds together, it's going to have really, really big implications as far as the kind of rate of return we should as shareholders expect on that acquisition overall.

Again, that's what you see. This is operations that are currently running that there's been expansion cases that have been announced and all of that. But I think the part that you see here is really the least exciting part of it despite the kind of trajectory that we're talking about here. What really drew us to this portfolio at the time of the acquisition and that really caught our attention during diligence was not just the mines that we could see currently operating or about to start ramping up, was the depth of the portfolio overall and how many projects that look like in the next investment cycle for lithium would stand to really look like strong candidates to attract capital and to become next production centers in the lithium space. And that's, I think, important.

Right now, with the rate of growth that we're seeing in the lithium market, we've seen incredible projections, I think one from Rio Tinto most recently that are predicting that the amount of lithium mine in the world every year in 10 years from now will be 3x the amount that's being produced today. That's just following along the current growth trajectory.

And the other thing about that demand that I like is this was a story entirely about electric vehicles a few years ago. And so as you view the world of electric vehicle adoption, you're really viewing the lithium world. But that's really started to change. It's become much broader and where we start to get some intertwining with the renewable energy business here because the big driver for lithium right now is not electric vehicles at all. It's -- where the market has been tough and surprised a little bit has been big batteries now getting added to renewable energy projects. These are those that were installed over the last 4 or 5 years and certainly anything newly installed. So that's been a big shift in that market and one of the big drivers. But again, what we're excited about here is that the market is going to need a lot more lithium. It's starting to put prices in place that will incentivize new production to come on board.

But mostly, what we're enthusiastic about is the fact that we're very confident that the portfolio that we now hold is going to represent an outsized share of that new production growth that's to come. So again, we see a lot of runway with this part of our business going forward. We're getting close to the end. So I was told someone on the team the other day told me, when you're talking about potash, please stop calling it boring. And I suppose I guess I suppose you're right, but I said it never surprises us. It never causes us any real stress. I mean what do you call that out boring? It was Lawrence actually. So I don't know reliable, like wonderful -- so anyway, I didn't call it boring. I guess I did, didn't I? Anyway, that's the message here. There's really not much to update, and that's what makes it so wonderful.

We just continue to see this market evolving just like it's expected to steadily compounding global demand growth, our mines feeding into that demand growth, holding market share, often earning market share. And we're getting closer and closer to a more exciting point probably here in that when you think about that global demand growth and steadily compounding and think about how it's going to get met, we're starting to run out of available supply that can feed into that. Like that's in sight now. And there are going to have major investments made in the global potash industry or we're going to run into a situation where there isn't enough available supply to meet demand.

We're getting closer to that with every bit of growth that occurs. And it's still our standing belief that the royalty mines that we hold represents the best place for that new growth to come from. They have the best -- they have the most advantaged operations. They have the ability to expand geopolitical safety and security. So the market will need more potash, and we really do believe that in the fullness of time that our assets are going to represent an outsized share of where that goes. So again, common theme from one commodity exposure to the other, you can see how we try to build assets in the portfolio. That's the kind of stuff we're looking for. We're looking for assets that are going to feed into that long-term growth.

The other thing I think is probably worth talking about here is the current lithium price -- or sorry, potash price is not terrible. Mines are making money, but it's not nearly enough of a price to incentivize that new growth that we're going to need to have at some point here sooner probably than most people think. And we do the math on that, and we think that number is almost twice the current market price before you'd even -- anyone could realistically make an investment case for big capacity growth in potash. We will need growth, but that growth will need to be incentivized. I can't tell you exactly when, but I mean that's our thesis here, and it's -- we think it's a solid one. There will be higher prices in potash ahead. And when those higher prices come, there will be volume growth across our portfolio.

I mean how boring is that? Okay, before I touch on iron ore. We did add to our IOC exposure this year or through Labrador Iron Ore. Dividends are down. There's no question about that. But the reason for it is one that we can get our heads around. The operator of the mine has been putting a lot of capital back into the operation to try to restore stability to the operations and really to pay back some capital starvation. I think that's the operations have seen in the past. So money is going in the ground. It's not coming out as dividends, which doesn't sound like a really exciting investment thesis. But for us, it is because the whole idea here is for that capital to ultimately make the operations better in the long term.

And yes, it helps to motivate or helps explain why we would have added some to our investment over the course of the year. But this is really a small part of what we think our future is in the iron ore space. Obviously, the most important part of what we look at going forward with respect to iron ore has all to do with the Kami project, which is the joint venture between Champion Iron Ore and Nippon Steel. And I guess we've been talking about it for a very long time, but we're finally at that point now. We'll see later on this year, results of a definitive feasibility study. So hopefully, we'll have some really good news when we're on this podium next year and talking about this asset. But why it's always worth talking about is that if this mine gets built, the Kami royalty becomes immediately our single biggest royalty exposure within the business.

And yes, last -- I think it's our last set here, a couple more things. So I've already touched on the fact the sale has been completed. We kept 1/3 of an interest. We have a much larger land area secured right now and confirmed. But the only other thing to update is that there has been a pre-feasibility study results published for the Arthur project just in the past couple of months. And really, what it's done is it pretty much confirmed the story that our teams would have developed internally last year as we were out marketing the asset. So everything is pretty much as we would have expected, but I don't think where anyone else had been expecting back then.

So it's kind of an opportunity for me to give kudos to the team and the work that they did in getting the market, the particular market we were dealing with to see what was coming well before the rest of the market did. But just a tremendous royalty is going to be a wonderful one for us in the long term. And to be fully honest, I don't think we've seen anywhere near the last of the scale and growth that this asset is going to represent.

Quick touch on project generation. Last year, that team was very busy trying to sell the silicon project on their business and doing some other things. So it was definitely a year where we let the cupboard get a little bare as far as projects and doing work to sell projects and generate new royalty interest. But a reversal of that is very much underway. And I think right now, we're on track for probably one of the strongest years we've ever had as far as adding new early-stage royalties to the business.

So kudos to Lawrence and Carol and Rod and the team for making sure that, that part of our business despite maybe a little bit of tension for a year is now rocking and rolling again because as we've always said, that's the engine of Altius right there. That's the goose where all the golden eggs come from. So it's really gratifying to me to hear and see that it's rock and roll time again there now. And that's enough for me. Are there any questions? Thank you very much, by the way, for coming out here today.

Brian, do you just want to ask if there are questions on the phone?

Sure. Operator, can you also open the phone lines for any questions?

[Operator Instructions]

Any questions in the room? Doing this 2 years in a row.

And we have our first question over the phone from Brandon [indiscernible].

Brian, great presentation. Can you walk me through, getting back to lithium, how the team thinks about the risk to the lithium price going forward with -- as it affected by possibly direct lithium extraction through oil and gas wastewater streams. It sounds like it's still experimental, but ExxonMobil is deploying a lot of capital into it. How does the management team think about that risk to the business when acquiring lithium?

Yes. So the question is around there's talk about the oil companies going in and sucking lithium from their oil operations or the wastewater is associated with them. And if that could come into the market and knock sort of the more established traditional players that are here today out of the game. And I guess the easiest way for me to answer is that if I had $1 for every time I heard that the oil industry was going to get involved with the mining world, turn it upside down.

Well, if I had a dollar for every dollar they wrote down doing that, then I'd have a lot of dollars. I think there's a place for DLE, there's lots of new technologies, not just in lithium, but I mean, solution mining is part of potash. It shows up in uranium. So I'm sure it has a place, but I still wouldn't put wastewater from an oil well up against high-grade lithium brines and dedicated sellers in Atacama Desert up against it. So I think it's a place, but if you're talking about something that completely reshapes the market, not a chance.

And your next question comes from the line of Adrian Day from Adrian Day Asset Management.

Yes, Brian, the problem is your business is so boring that we don't have any questions. But I had a quick question on the prospect generation. Am I correct in thinking that your primary motive for getting involved in juniors is the possibility that you might have a royalty at the other end, even if you don't negotiate a royalty with an investment? Or are you actually willing to take investments in just good projects where you think there'll be a capital return, but no likelihood, no reasonable likelihood of a royalty?

I think the first part is definitely right that the motivation for us investing with juniors is to be attached to royalties on ideas and projects that they generate. But there's definitely examples in the past where we've bent from that a little bit where something was just so compelling enough and we've already done the work technically and saw enough opportunity to maybe speculate a little more on a pure equity basis. That will be usually situations where maybe there's already too much royalty burden or something along those lines that just makes the royalty angle not easy to install.

And I guess there's other times where we tend to be -- we've made investments in hopes that the relationship could build and get to the point that there's royalty interest down the road. But like are we like trying to become a fund manager to the junior sector, like a pure equity type player? No, but we're not going to be foolish enough to not pick up dollars on the ground if our work finds something that's just so compelling otherwise. The primary focus, no doubt is ultimately to grow out the organic royalty portfolio.

And there are no further questions at this time. I will now hand the call back to Mr. Brian Dalton, CEO, for any closing remarks.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you. And this concludes today's call. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and to the Altius Q1 2026 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Wednesday, May 13, 2026.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Flora Wood. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Joanna. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q1 2026 conference call. Our press release and interim filings were released yesterday after the close and are available on our website. This event is being webcast live, and you'll be able to access a replay of the call along with the presentation slides that are on the homepage of our website and also in the Investors section.

We will also hold our AGM today at 11:30 Eastern Time after this call and have a more detailed presentation on the website or going on the website after this call for the AGM. You can also access the AGM virtually with an open Q&A session.

Brian Dalton, CEO; and Stephanie Hussey, CFO, will speak on the call. With us in the room is Ernie Ortiz, VP Corp Dev and Head of Lithium. Ernie is here to answer questions on lithium in the Q&A. The forward-looking statement on Slide 2 applies to everything we say both in our remarks and during the Q&A session.

And with that, Stephanie is up first.

Thanks, Flora, and good morning, everybody. Yesterday, we reported Q1 net earnings of $2.6 million or $0.05 per share, reflecting higher revenues, offset by higher expenses, which included onetime post-closing fees associated with our LRC acquisition. Royalty revenue of $27 million and adjusted EBITDA of $20 million for the first quarter reflect higher realized prices, timing of copper stream deliveries, increased electricity royalty revenue and the addition of 4 operating lithium royalties. These increases were partially offset by lower dividends from iron ore.

Operating cash flow was impacted by higher tax payments and working capital changes as well as the payment of post-closing LRC expenses. Q1 adjusted net earnings of $0.11 per share was higher than Q1 2025, with the main adjusting item being nonrecurring costs following the LRC close.

On March 6, we completed a plan of arrangement in which Altius acquired all the outstanding shares of Lithium Royalty Corp for share consideration of 9.6 million Altius shares and cash of $140 million. The corporation had previously advanced a loan of $14 million to LRC following the announcement in December.

Current total liquidity available to the corporation is approximately $350 million, which includes cash on hand, $125 million available under the revolver as well as $62.5 million potentially available as an accordion feature subject to certain criteria under the terms of our credit facility. In April, the corporation received $30.5 million as a cash distribution from the Royalty Capital Fund relating to investments made by Altius during the founding and early development of LRC.

In the quarter, we made scheduled debt repayments of $2 million on the term credit facility. We paid total cash dividends of $5.2 million and issued approximately 8,000 common shares under the dividend reinvestment plan. The corporation, under its NCIB, repurchased and canceled approximately 227,000 common shares for a total cost of $9.9 million. And yesterday, our Board of Directors approved a quarterly dividend of $0.10 per share to be paid to shareholders of record on May 29 with a payment date of June 15.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Brian.

Thank you, Stephanie. Good morning, everyone. Today, rather than try to walk you through developments across the broader portfolio, as we would typically attempt here, we plan to instead focus in on 2 particularly quickly evolving areas of the business, namely the electricity and lithium components. These, of course, have some intertwining macro level drivers. Soon after this call, we will be starting our AGM. And there, a broader overview presentation is planned, and you are, of course, more than welcome to ask about any of our exposure areas in the Q&A following these remarks.

The first area we want to cover is the electricity royalties business as represented by our shareholding in Altius Renewable Royalties, or ARR, and in turn, our effective 29% interest in the underlying operating entity, Great Bay Royalties or GBR. Several of you have been asking us to dive a bit deeper on this part of our business as quarterly revenue from it has begun to accelerate and take on greater relative significance within our diversified portfolio.

One key deliverable that is intended to help us meet this ask is included in our accompanying quarterly presentation. There, you will find a new 5-year forward-looking revenue illustration that is broken down by category of royalty origination. What should stand out clearly is that the recently establishing trend of increasing period-over-period revenue still has plenty of runway ahead.

Also, later today during the AGM business update presentation that will also be made available on our website, you will find new supporting materials that outline current market conditions within the U.S. electricity generation sector as well as the investment opportunity set that GBR is pursuing to further build out this growth profile.

I believe that most of you will know that Altius was an original co-founder of GBR back in 2019, when we partnered up with Frank Getman and his team in New Hampshire to see if we could bring adoption of the royalty finance model to the renewable electricity generation sector. Some of the initial attraction for us to try to achieve this, stem from our strong internal belief that long implied resource lives in the natural resource royalty business are the best predictor of future optionality realizations. And in this case, the resource lives we were considering were essentially perpetual.

The real question for us was around whether or not we could convince the sector to adopt the model in a way that has occurred over time within other natural resource royalty sectors, such as mining and oil and gas. Now 7 years into the initiative, I think it is fully safe to say that this objective has indeed been successfully achieved. The platform is well established and the team focus today has instead shifted to the adding of additional scale and diversity to the portfolio.

The 2 key approaches that GBR has used to build this royalty platform to date are: number one, through direct royalty level investments into late development and operating stage projects; and secondly, through the backing of the portfolios of earlier-stage developer groups in exchange for royalties on the projects that they ultimately plan to vend out to power plant operators. This second path has obvious parallels with the traditional Altius PG approach to mining royalty creation.

Back when GBR began, its focus was almost entirely on these earlier-stage developer deals, owing to difficulty in achieving acceptable returns from advanced stage investments because of overly competitive capital availability conditions in that part of the U.S. power market. Today, that is no longer true as several of the competing sources of capital that were highly active a few years ago have become more subdued. We feel that this is due to the emergence of a relatively more restrictive philosophical government policy approach to the sector as well as the easing of ESG-focused investment mandates by many large pools of capital, the anti-woke pendulum swing, if you will.

The result, irrespective of the reasons, is that GBR is currently identifying more opportunities to make investments in late-stage and operating assets at more attractive implied returns than it could a few years ago. Based on the strength of its deal pipeline, it is expecting 2026 to be one of its most significant from a new royalty investment deployment perspective with almost all of its currently -- current activity focused on late-stage investment opportunities.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the current competitive dynamic and the countercyclical opportunity feel this market has about is that it exists at all. I say this because the underlying sector fundamentals are so contrastingly bullish with an explosion in demand for new power generation being experienced across most parts of the U.S. which is a trend that was establishing itself even before the hefty additional pressure from new data center build expectations added into the momentum.

This increase in demand, combined with new build time line and other constraints that are impacting other types of generation more particularly, is resulting in big increases in the prices that end users are willing to accept on the power -- on the term power purchase contracts with renewable power developers. So it is strange times indeed to have a sector boom of this strength underway, while at the same time, seeing constrained capital conditions and down cycle-like return generation opportunities. Strange but wonderful.

The current GBR focus is certainly more directed towards late-stage project investments, but this does not mean it is let up on continuing to support and benefit from its portfolio of earlier-stage development company investments. These were always seen as longer lead time endeavors to reach royalty generation or royalty revenue generation, but enough time has passed now for GBR to begin to see a big uptick in the number of these projects approaching commissioning and first royalty revenues.

In fact, there are 5 projects within the portfolio today that are under construction. Notable amongst these are a series of projects that originated within our first investee company, Tri-Global Energy, or TGE, before it was subsequently acquired by Enbridge, which has now taken on that portfolio of projects and is aggressively building it out.

It is also worth here describing some other innovations developed by GBR as its business has matured. One example has been the addition of ancillary deal components to its developer royalty investment structures. These included adding hybrid equity exposure in developers alongside royalty rights, again, not dissimilar to the way Altius often structures hybrid royalty equity deals with its minerals PG business.

In other cases, GBR now gains entitlements to a share of the sales proceeds, typically milestone-based that developers receive upon vending their highly in-demand projects out to end builders and operators. As GBR looks forward, it sees the potential for meaningful cash generation from these ancillary innovations that is over and above its royalty flows. In fact, in the case of sharing of project sales proceeds, GBR's share of milestone payments could bring in as much as $100 million over the next 3 or 4 years as the developers successfully execute their business plans.

Another innovation that GBR has brought to market over the past couple of years is this interconnection deposit financing program. Under this initiative, GBR posts fully refundable deposits on behalf of developers to allow them to hold positions in queues for grid interconnection, allowing the developers to not tie up their own capital and to direct more of it instead towards actual project development activity. GBR funds these deposits through a dedicated underlying credit facility and then generates a positive margin through the fees provided back to it by the developers.

While these net revenue amounts are indeed becoming collectively meaningful and are shown as a separate category on the new revenue chart we are providing, the main intended function of this business line is to support royalty business development. This comes through the positive relationships with several new project sponsors that have and are being created. And in certain cases, GBR is directly supporting its existing developer investee companies with this program and allowing them to more rapidly advance projects towards sales and operations with GBR royalties attached, of course.

I'll wrap up here on GBR and electricity -- Altius' electricity royalty exposure by saying that it is a business that we have established a lot of belief in. It has now reached an exciting stage of its development with a business platform and offering that has been embraced by some of the largest and most sophisticated players in the power generation industry and a market conditions backdrop that is highly conducive towards meeting its objective of further building out scale and portfolio diversity.

The other business area I want to focus on here today, albeit more briefly, is with respect to our recently acquired lithium royalty portfolio. In some ways, it is hard to believe how much has transpired here in the short time that has elapsed since the acquisition was announced in mid-December. The most obvious development has been with respect to the commodity price, which has now doubled since the announcement and confirmed a cyclical upwards turn from the deep lows of 2025. These higher prices are driving obvious positive impacts for us in terms of revenue generation from the 4 currently operating lithium royalties that we hold, but there are other developments that are occurring that we believe will be even more impactful in the bigger picture.

Lithium demand has been compounding at incredible rates for the past 5 years or so now. But rather than beginning to succumb to the law of large numbers, as many have been calling for, demand appears actually to be instead accelerating. Importantly, the sources of the demand growth are also becoming more diversified beyond electric vehicle-based dominants, with the most notable new driver being the increasing addition of battery storage pairings to the rapidly expanding global fleet of renewable electricity plants. Recall my earlier comments about intertwining macro drivers.

The result in any event has been a growing recognition that market deficits for lithium have reemerged much more quickly than expected and that a significant volume of new supply will be required to set in order to keep pace. Some credible estimates, in fact, pegged the amount of new supply required at 3x current production levels 10 years from now, which is a very short time to try to build that much productive capacity in mining.

The operators of our lithium royalty mines are responding because they can. We have heard each of the operators of Tres Quebradas, Mariana, Goulamina and Grota do Cirilo all either initiate or confirm intentions to proceed to Phase 2 expansions. The Finniss project has recently closed financing and confirmed plans to restart operations later this year, while the Neves project has begun awarding contracts to kick off its construction.

Looking beyond these projects, one of the key attractions of the LRC acquisition for us was the deep pipeline of exploration through feasibility stage projects that it had assembled. We conducted extensive technical diligence on this part of the portfolio at the time and remain convinced that several of these projects represent leading candidates to emerge as part of the solution to the industry supply challenge ahead.

In our accompanying presentation slides, we have also included an updated 5-year lithium royalty revenue illustration. This has seen meaningful upward shifts from the one used in our acquisition explain our investor deck in response to the price and volume growth signals that have come in subsequently. And during today's AGM presentation, we will also provide some additional supporting materials to reinforce our views on the lithium market developments that have been discussed here today. Exciting times. Thank you.

And with that, let's turn it over to questions.

[Operator Instructions]

First question comes from Orest Wowkodaw with Scotiabank.

Obviously, Brian, you and the team have been very active in the last 2 years reshaping the portfolio. Just curious where you think you go from here with respect to commodity exposure. I mean, obviously, the lithium acquisition was really well timed before pricing took off. But do you see certain commodities where there could be opportunities in this environment?

Definitely. I think that obviously, there's a much better sentiment around right now, and there's more readily available capital from competing sources. So not everything looks exciting to us. But it seems -- it feels to me like it's pretty segmented. There's some areas, some commodity exposure areas that you're hearing lots about, but there's others, if you're hearing about them at all, it's usually with the disdain. So it's not across the board that we feel like all of the growth from here has to come from operator type investments from their increasing cash flows across the portfolio. I mean I definitely believe that that's the most important part of our growth going forward. But I'm not saying that we're -- I'm definitely not telling the team like hands down, there's nothing to do here.

And just from a portfolio perspective, I mean, in our valuation, lithium is pretty dominant from a NAV perspective. Is there a certain target that you'd like to get that to? Or are you happy with it being just such a dominant part of the overall valuation?

It's probably a little out of balance right now, but there's 2 ways for that to sort itself, right? And the one I prefer is to just make sure that we continue to see good steady growth across the rest. Obviously, prices have been a big driver there in the very recent term and the point at which the portfolio was acquired, it was right at that inflection point for a lot of assets to come on board. But when I look at the electricity side for one, the deployment opportunity there is really strong, and that's going to easily hold its own and maintain weight within that broader portfolio.

Potash will do it in a non-splashy typical potash like way, but it will just get bigger and bigger and bigger over time. There's good growth coming from the -- on the base metal side. We heard Vale talking about expansion potential now at Voisey's Bay. We're all watching for what Lundin says about the sanction decision at Sa va. Curipamba is on stream later this year. So you're never going to get that pie chart of wedges of exposure areas when you're trying to manage what we're trying to manage exactly where you want it at any one point in time, but I'm not concerned at all about how it's all evolving. Like I think all of our business areas right now have got really good growth drivers. And if something looks more permanently out of whack after the dust settles a little bit, we can always adjust something downwards. That's easy, but it's certainly not -- it's not the approach we're taking to it right now.

The next question comes from Carey MacRury with Canaccord Genuity.

First of all, thank you for those revenue charts. Those are super helpful. So I appreciate that.

You were in line when we were putting them together on that line.

So maybe a follow-up question to Orest. Obviously, you have a lot of cash on the balance sheet, almost $130 million. Are you seeing opportunities where you can deploy some of that cash in the near term? Or just given $6 copper and pretty healthy lithium prices, we should be waiting for a while.

Again, no pressure to do that. I mean the LRC transaction to me was sort of the first -- go back a bit, right? If you think about all the divestiture work in the middle part of last year around silicon and when the cash balance was really pretty heavy. So LRC, that transaction sorted us through a lot of that. But again, there are -- not everything is rip roaring right now. I'm feeling contrarian enthusiasm about some commodity areas right now.

I know for sure that there's a steady opportunity to continue to deploy on the electricity side. But we'll be patient if we have to. But as I said to Orest there, the team has still got lots of targets in mind that don't feel like they're -- it's -- we're being too procyclical in pursuing them. But it's not as good as it was in 2016. That's for sure. And if we have to sit on cash for a while, we've done that before, too. So yes.

Again, there's lots of growth to come here just because everyone is making more money and markets are back and capital is available, and we know our assets are going to see more than their share of that, and that is coming. But no, I wouldn't count us out for being showing up more external M&A from here. I don't know if it will be giant splashy stuff, but I can see ways we can tweak and build on our portfolio particularly if we start thinking out into the next decade and the one after that and the one after that, there's always something to do.

All right. Appreciate that. And then on the GBR side, the revenue is really starting to ramp up here. Is GBR distributing cash to its partners? Or is the cash being held in the business to deploy in that business?

Yes. At this point, for sure, like the goal there is to recycle the capital of the revenues that are coming in into more deployments. There's a really healthy pipeline of opportunities there. For the most part, it is related to in construction or already operating projects or immediate impact. But I think all of us as shareholders, whether it's us, Apollo or Northampton and the Dutch pension fund, want to -- we all see that the highest and best use of that capital is not to flow up and out, but instead to get poured into more growth and to just build scale here now. It's got a really nice window opened up for itself right now.

And then maybe just one last one on the same topic. The $74 million in 2030, is that sort of the peak number given all the capital that's been deployed? Or is there a peak number that's a few years out from that?

I wouldn't say it's a peak number there. No, because it won't -- like a lot of the development stage royalties, so ones that developers brought along, sold to an operator who are now moving them along through pipeline, some are coming out as operating like that -- there's still -- like a lot of what we're seeing now would be from TGE, for example, the front end of that, right? That would have been the first of those developer deals. But there's a bunch more that have happened since, and those are tailing along a little bit behind. So there's lots more to come there.

And I would probably also say that it will be disappointing, I think, for everyone involved if there's not meaningful bolstering of that profile, both within the period we're showing and beyond that stems from the kinds of deployment potential we're seeing right now into -- and fairly chunky kinds of investments as well into near-term revenue-generating sort of more advanced stage royalty investments. So no, I don't see any sign of plateauing in that business at this point. It's quite the opposite. It just really feels like it's getting its legs now.

And maybe just one last one, actually, if I can. The end game for GBR, is this meant to be private forever? Or are the partners thinking about sort of taking this public in the future, just given how much growth that has been built up in the portfolio?

There actually hasn't been a lot of discussion about exits or anything else. It's all about wow, this thing is really starting to take hold now, and it's like, how much can we scale this too? Like that's really the focus. It's one of those kind of Kenny Rogers "know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em" situations.

The next question comes from Ernad Sijercic with TD Securities.

On lithium, are you seeing any early signs of narrowing discounts to spot pricing?

Ernie, you're on.

Yes. So we are starting to see a narrowing of the discount. You're also seeing prices starting to continue to move up and also the lag -- there's normally a 1 quarter lag as we've seen with both majors and our own production. So you'll start to see probably better pricing in the second and third quarter given just the momentum and then just the catch-up from some of those quotational pricing adjustments. But given the tightness in the market, we are also seeing discounts lessen given just the need for product out there right now.

That's great. And just one more for me. Do you think the recent strength in your share price will change your shareholder return strategy? Or will you keep it the same?

I mean I would characterize our returns of capital, however you want to look at that dividends and the buybacks probably more particularly is always opportunistic. So when you default to that, there's really never a reason to change, right? It's just keep an eye on things. As far as like the dividend side of things go, I think that the business continues to strengthen its platform and its cash generation abilities continue to move up. And I think we're running a 10-year track record right now of increasing dividends. It wasn't something that came up for discussion in this quarter, but it will come up pretty soon again. It typically does in the third quarter. And yes, again, we're feeling pretty constructive about the long-term health and strength of the business, but I'm not going to prejudge a Board decision on that either.

The next question comes from Brian MacArthur with Raymond James.

Can I just go back to Slide 5 with the electricity royalty ramp-up? And there's all sorts of caveats on there, which I get. But you also talked about $100 million in ancillary revenue from development fee sharing. Is there a lot of that in those numbers? Or is that -- and just as I think of this going forward, is this such a big part of that business now that I could view it as a -- I mean a royalty goes forever effectively. But these sound to me a little more like one-off development payments, so they might be more chunky if you see what I'm saying, but maybe they're sustainable in a big way. Can you just comment a little bit on that, Brian?

Certainly. Well, first off, the revenue numbers we're showing there, that relates just to royalties. There is a subset there that deals with the interconnection work. So the ancillary payments attached to project sales. So these are developer fees. So they sell a project on, they get paid as well, right? They sell a project on that has our royalty attached. Well, some of the later deals, developer deals had that right to basically share in some of those developer fees. Others had equity.

That was just learning that came along the way. If we had been equity holders in TG at the time of the Enbridge acquisition, it would have been a pretty monumental day for us. And they hear TG talk about it at the time that the reason that they were able to grow and scale their business to the point that an Enbridge wanted to buy them is because of our capital, we got smarter along the way.

But -- so the $100 million we're talking about there, that relates to projects that have already basically had deals done on them coming out of different developers. The schedule of milestone payments has been established as part of those sales agreements, and then we're just doing the math on what our share of those payment amounts might be. There's some risk associated with it. I mean some of these milestone payments might not get made. And of course, we wouldn't get payments, but it's not completely arm waving either. These are credible buyers who've negotiated to buy assets and have agreed to payment schedules.

It would be really hard, Brian, to try to extrapolate forward how much of that type of revenue you could count on going forward. It's going to be very much more like -- to be like trying to predict how much revenue Altius Minerals is going to make in its PG business. It's by definition, it's going to be episodic and lumpy. It may be a little more stable once it gets sort of rolling on the GBR side of things just because those developers and their selling of projects tend to be more of a steady pipeline.

But we don't have enough visibility at this point to predict how many projects they're going to sell and how much revenue might flow back to us as part of that. So it's just a little harder to be predictive around. We just know it's -- in the near term, it looks like it's going to be very meaningful. And that beyond that, there is really, really strong demand out there right now for the projects that developers have in their pipeline.

So as it stands now, they look to be in really good shape to continue to generate project sales. And to the extent that, that proves to be correct, yes, we will see this ancillary revenue for one of a better term, continue to become impactful. And it has the potential really to be a pretty big source of capital at the GBR level to fund future deployments into royalties, which, again, really strong parallels here as to how the Altius Minerals royalty portfolio has been built. A lot of the royalties that sit within minerals today were ultimately acquired with revenues that came in from ancillary or equity type episodic wins over the years.

So a long answer, but hopefully, one that gives you much more color on that point, and I appreciate how it's maybe hard to read from that slide.

No, I think that's very, very helpful. But then so -- but it's interesting to me, as you said, like you're talking about all this coming in from '26 to '28. So there's nothing for any of this in here. This table is just the -- if I want to think about it, the royalty/other facts that are generated from that. Is that correct?

Yes, that's royalty revenue and a little bit of contribution from the net proceeds from the interconnection deposits.

Right, which is you show it there.

No, we haven't tried to plot the other project sales proceeds in this. We look at it as a separate bucket as well. So the more recurring type revenue is what you're seeing in the table.

But if you get those, will that be counted as revenue? Or is that more like if I think about it in an equity sale and it will go through like cash somewhere else? I mean you're going to get cash, I get it. But just how will that actually be reflected then it will just be reflected in revenue eventually?

I don't know really. Steph, you could jump in on that one. For me, it's cash. That's all I know, but I don't know if it's going to be classed as revenue. Over to you, Steph.

Yes, that's right, Brian, and both Brians actually. We treat it as a cash inflow for sure. There might be a portion that gets included as revenue, but it's hard to tell until that actually happens and the mechanism from which project it comes from. So I think we'll just treat it as cash flow for now.

Perfect. And maybe just switching gears to the lithium business. Just on Goulamina, just because it's kind of in there for the first time, obviously, a good number, good project. Was there any -- just because of the first quarter reporting, are there any true-ups in volumes or anything that distort those numbers for this quarter? I take your point, Ernie, that prices will probably go on higher later so you get more than that. But do I need to worry about any volume things that distorted that first quarter number just because you're closing the transaction?

No. So there is no -- there were no volume impacts in there. The asset continues to ramp up nicely and was sequentially higher slightly, but that's -- production is going smoothly and no impact from the country. And as far as pricing adjustments, yes, we did see a benefit, a positive additional pricing adjustment in the quarter, which based on the current spot price, but also likely to occur in the second quarter, but no impact on volume.

The next question comes from Adrian Day with Adrian Day Asset Management.

I wanted to just follow up, if I may, on the very first couple of questions and look at it from the other direction. And that is when you look back -- when you look at your portfolio, stand back and look at it, forgetting about current prices, forgetting about current opportunities, where do you think you are underinvested? What is it you look at and say, gosh, we love these characteristics. They fit with the Altius model, and we just don't have enough. And then if I may just follow up quickly, specifically uranium, which would seem to fit your characteristics? And also, what are your thoughts on adding more gold and silver, again, forgetting about price at the moment, but what are your thoughts on gold and silver, which perhaps don't have the Altius characteristics?

Yes. Like there's areas that we'd be interested in. We've always thought about things like big widely traded commodities that we don't have exposure to like aluminum, but we just haven't found a way in yet on that. It's just a different kind of industry. So that's one that I would certainly point to. On a revenue basis, to me, we feel light right now in iron ore just because of the relative to the weight that, that represents in the global mining world. But I think that probably takes care of itself just with Kami and Champion. Uranium, yes, we've tried a couple of things there to get involved with advanced stage projects, but it's pretty competitive. Like there are a lot of other types of capital that are inclined there. Like it's -- there's lots of hands up to put money into those projects. And so it becomes a challenge of returns. And we also think that there tends to be a bit of an optimism around time lines from vendors when we talk in that area, but definitely fair game, open for us.

On the gold side, we're getting it anyway. When I look at Curipamba coming on stream, right, probably at least half of the NSR from that project despite it being really a big base metal mine, but more than half of the NSR right now is coming in from gold and silver. So we're already going to start getting meaningful revenues there coming up pretty soon. There's still the challenge though of competition around royalties that are more pure precious metals. And it's obviously a pretty formidable set of competitors we're dealing with there if you're trying to go toe to toe on opportunities there.

Earlier stage exploration side, like we're really active on the gold front. It's probably still the most active part of our project generation business. So we're definitely not opposed to the idea of creating another silicon royalty or something along those lines, but that wouldn't offset me philosophically or anything. But it's just really -- it's a matter of is it a practical opportunity set to be really pursuing.

And I'll be honest, we're still big shareholders of origin. So sometimes when we see those opportunities come across our desk, we'll just deflect them over there because that's a more pure precious metals royalty company that we're really closely aligned with, have a really nice partnership with and are a big shareholder of. So we're not unexposed. I don't feel like we're dramatically underweight.

And the last point I'll make is that there's never been a problem with us owning gold royalties. It's not -- there's no inverse situation where we'll get punished for having too much gold exposure that maybe a pure precious metals royalty company might worry about in the other direction. So it's really just a more practical, competitive call really as to where we direct our energies and efforts and not be setting ourselves up to waste a bunch of time on things that are almost certain not to pay out.

Okay. And, Brian, we won't be upset if you get another silicon either.

Good. We'll go and do that then.

[Operator Instructions]

We have no further questions. I'll turn the call back over to Flora Wood for closing comments.

Thank you, Joanna, and thank you, everybody, who joined and again, for the great questions. I hope some of you -- all of you can tune in for the AGM. And if not, we'll look forward to speaking with you for Q2.

Thanks, everyone.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating, and we ask that you please disconnect your lines.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Altius Q4 and Year-End 2025 Financial Results Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] Also note that this call is being recorded on Wednesday, March 11, 2026.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Flora Wood, VP, Investor Relations and Sustainability. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Sylvie. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q4 and Year-End 2025 Conference Call. Our press release and filings were released yesterday after the close and are available on our website. We also filed our AIF last night. This event is being webcast live, and you'll be able to access a replay of the call along with the presentation slides that have been added to altiusminerals.com.

Brian Dalton, CEO; and Stephanie Hussey, CFO, will be speakers on the call. The forward-looking statement on Slide 2 applies to everything we say both in our formal remarks and during the Q&A session.

And with that, Stephanie is up first to take us through the numbers.

Thank you, Flora, and good morning, everyone. Yesterday, we reported Q4 net earnings of $22.5 million or $0.48 per share and full year net earnings of $299 million or $6.45 per share.

Net earnings were mainly impacted by the $375 million gain on the sale of the Arthur Gold royalty interest. We had lower amortization, interest and other costs, partially offset by an increased loss from joint venture. The corporation also recognized a $64 million gain during the year in other comprehensive earnings following the Orogen Triple Flag plan of arrangement.

Royalty revenue and adjusted EBITDA for Q4 and the year reflect higher potash and base metal prices, an increase in copper stream deliveries as well as growth in the ARR portfolio, including interconnection financing agreements. These increases were partially offset by lower dividends from iron ore. Operating cash flow followed the trend of revenue, which were offset by higher taxes paid.

Adjusted net earnings for both the quarter and year are higher than 2024, with the main adjusting item being the gain on the sale of the Arthur Gold royalty, impairment charges at GBR on the Hodson development portfolio and any related tax impacts. At the end of 2025, we had cash on hand of $294 million.

Last week, we closed the previously announced plan of arrangement with LRC for Altius share consideration of approximately 9.6 million common shares and cash consideration of $140 million. Following the close and factoring in transaction costs, total liquidity available is approximately $332 million, and that includes cash on hand, $125 million available under the revolver as well as $62.5 million potentially available as an accordion feature, which is subject to certain criteria under the terms of our credit facility.

We also expect future proceeds equivalent in value to approximately 960,000 Altius shares that stem from LP-based investments we made in funds controlled by Waratah Capital at the time of the founding and early development of LRC. It's expected these funds will wind up and distribute cash or share proceeds to unitholders in the coming months.

During the year, we made debt repayments of $17 million, which included a $9 million voluntary repayment on the revolving facility and $8 million of scheduled principal repayments on our term debt, paid total cash dividends of $16 million and issued approximately 49,000 common shares under the dividend reinvestment plan. In August, the corporation renewed its normal course issuer bid for another year and repurchased and canceled 54,000 common shares for a total cost of $1.6 million.

Yesterday, our Board approved a quarterly dividend of $0.10 per share to be paid to shareholders of record on March 19 with a payment date of April 2. Our renewable royalty business has seen increased market activity and new opportunities arising from development, construction and operating level investments. In late '25 and early '26, GBR deployed or committed approximately USD 96 million in new royalty investments, including the reorganization of an existing portfolio investment. This deployment includes USD 42.5 million royalty investment with Apex Clean Energy and up to USD 50 million investment with Granite Source Power. We can expect to see continued growth in this business.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Brian.

Thank you, Steph, and congrats on completing your first full quarter reporting as our CFO, a quarter that had some meaningful M&A activity thrown into the mix to get you kicked off properly.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you, as always, for taking the time to be with us today. Last quarter on this call, we spoke about efforts that were underway to find ways to accretively deploy the capital resources we gained through the monetization of part of our interest in the Arthur Gold district discovery in Nevada. We noted that we were actively considering various options and that we hope to be able to tell you more about these in coming quarters. And so here we are quarter end later with 2 such updates to share.

The more visible of these came with an announcement we made in December that we had reached an agreement to combine with Lithium Royalty Corporation in a transaction that would see the addition of 37 new royalties to our portfolio plus some new like-minded and long-term shareholders and added further depth to our management team with Ernie Ortiz joining.

The near-term impact of this transaction will be a healthy bolstering of royalty revenue from several recently commissioned projects as well as several already financed or planned expansions and restarts. A deeper motivation for the transaction was, however, rooted in a more medium- to long-term outlook around the geared optionality we saw embedded in the portfolio.

This stems from the very long implied resource lives and highly competitive future investment attributes of the portfolio assets. Meaningful scale in the lithium market is developing very fast now as the role of batteries across a growing myriad of use cases becomes more and more important. Electrical energy continues to grow in absolute and relative dominance in powering global industry and countless elements of our individual lives.

The rapid advancement of battery technology so far this century has provided a potent new delimiting ingredient to the growth trajectory of electrical power utilization. As a result, we can now store, trade and regulate power in ways that enhance overall generation utilization rates while diminishing intermittency challenges more efficiently and effectively than ever. We can now even transport and deploy power at scale without the constraint of a continuous physical tether to grids or generators.

The impact of these technological and scaling breakthroughs is arguably still underappreciated in terms of the impact it is enabling for electricity, irrespective of generation type to continue to gain market share within the global energy mix. Lithium, the raw input materials that have emerged most critically through this battery technology revolution is, as a result, growing in consumption at compounding rates that are nothing short of eye watering.

Consider for a moment the speed at which this consumption has caught up with the supposed oversupply that was incentivized during the early part of this decade. We've gone from a narrative still dominant barely a year ago that it would take eons for this overhang of supply to be absorbed to now suddenly finding ourselves facing market deficits that will take incredible amounts of effort and capital to overcome, starting right now, if not sooner.

We firmly believe that our portfolio holds an outsized share of exposure to the production growth that will ultimately be commercially reincentivized and prioritized in solving for this challenge. And this takes us back around to why it is the medium- and long-term outlook here that has us so enthused about combining forces with LRC.

The second, perhaps less visible capital deployment initiative we were able to execute on during the latter part of 2025 was to increase our interest in Labrador Iron Ore Royalty Corporation, or LIF. This is a company that holds on a shareholder pass-through basis, 2 highly distinct forms of interest in the high-purity iron ore operations of the Iron Ore Company of Canada and Labrador.

These deposits have been in continuous production for more than 60 years and still hold extensive mineral endowments that could potentially allow them to continue for as long or more going forward. LIF holds both a direct equity stake in these operations and receives a share of its marginal operational cash flows, less capital investment requirements as dividends. It also holds a royalty interest, and this provides it with a share of IOC gross sales that are irrespective of operational margins or capital investment requirements. The latter part is where we see the most value and longer-term growth potential underpinning our investment.

At the moment, the operations of IOC are struggling. A protracted period of underinvestment in properly sustaining the mines and processing plants during the end of the last decade and early part of this one has come predictably home to roost.

Thankfully, however, this is now being met with meaningful amounts of effort and investment in restoring IOC to its potential. We believe that it will likely still take a few years to really get the ship righted, but it is happening and happening under the watch of one of the world's most established and financially capable iron ore operators.

We made our investment with eyes wide open that while royalty revenues will continue to flow through the recapitalization program, equity dividends to lift will probably continue to be severely curtailed while IOC cash flows are prioritized towards restoring the operations instead of issuing dividends. The vision for our investment is, therefore, clearly a medium- to longer-term one in which once the significant work on the ground is completed, royalty production volumes will not only increase into a rising demand market for high-purity products, but also one in which the overall multi-decade sustainability of the asset has been insured.

So this covers the new ways our team has recently found to deploy capital in ways we believe will continue to strengthen our portfolio and enhance our growth trajectory for decades to come. It also hopefully provides you, our shareholders, with a clear picture of and a shared belief in the long-term rationale behind our new investments.

Turning now to a number of other positive but more incremental developments that we saw across our portfolio during the quarter and it didn't involve us having to deploy any additional capital. Sentiment has turned up for several of the subsectors that comprise our industry. For several years now, you've heard us preach of the inevitable consequence of what turned out to be more than a decade of broad-based underinvestment, during which we have also been strategically preparing for it in terms of our portfolio positioning.

The cycle has now finally turned and the mining industry is collectively preparing to mobilize to meet the daunting challenge of replenishing declining assets and building a new to meet ever-increasing demand for the essential, some would even say critical materials that it produces.

So during the quarter, we heard positive commentary from Lundin about moving forward with incorporating the new Saúva discovery into the broader Chapada district mining plan and in so doing, potentially increasing copper production levels by 25% to 35%. Silvercorp reported on continued construction progress in building the new El Domo mine in Ecuador and reiterated its expectations for first production of copper, gold, silver and zinc for the second half of next year.

Vale spoke of the success they are having in bringing its 2 new underground mines in the Voisey's Bay district fully online and in ramping up nickel, copper and cobalt production. AngloGold provided an upbeat update on the Arthur Gold project as they move through studies and permitting processes. The recently reported PFS highlights indicated a greater than 500,000 ounce per year producer at Tier 1 cash costs with initial production targeted for the beginning of the next decade.

This followed earlier stated commentary from AngloGold, and I quote, "That when fully developed, the complex is anticipated to be a long-life multimillion ounce producer, which will become the center of gravity for AngloGold Ashanti." Nutrien and Mosaic both stated expectations of a record year for potash demand in 2026. Nutrien reiterated its intent to continue to grow its production in line with the goal of maintaining their industry-leading market share, while Mosaic noted expectations for record production levels from Esterhazy, which has now become the world's single largest potash mine.

Altius Renewables and its underlying Great Bay Renewables delivered another record year for royalty revenue as its portfolio of development stage electricity generation project royalties continues to progressively mature to active operations. It also was successful in deploying into 2 new investments totaling USD 96 million for both an advanced stage near-term revenue-generating wind-based royalty and a development portfolio relating primarily to a number of battery energy storage projects.

Champion and its partners, Nippon and Sojitz consummated their new partnership during the year and reported on continued methodical advancement of the Kami project towards a definitive feasibility study that is expected to be completed later this year.

We'll wrap up here by simply saying that the team continues to be very busy in sourcing and evaluating new opportunities for investment across both of our royalty and PG platforms and that we hope to be able to tell you more about these in coming quarters and probably not so much in the Q&A that we'll now invite you to begin. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] And at this time, it appears we have no questions registered. I would like to turn the call back over to Ms. Wood.

Thank you, Sylvie. And I know we've got analysts traveling on site visits and also to other provinces. So I'm not surprised there's no questions today. But I'd like to thank everybody for joining us, and we look forward to speaking with you in Q1.

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 your lines. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Altius Minerals Q3 Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Wednesday, November 12, 2025. And I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Flora Wood. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Ina. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q3 conference call. Our press release and interim filings were released yesterday after the close and are available on our website. This event is being webcast live, and you'll be able to access a replay of the call along with this presentation slides that are on our website at altiusminerals.com. Brian Dalton, CEO; and Stephanie Hussey, CFO are our speakers for the call.

You've heard Stephanie before when she substituted for Ben. For this quarter, I'm proud to introduce her as CFO. Now on forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statement on Slide 2 applies to everything we say in our formal remarks and during the Q&A. And with that, Stephanie is up first. .

Thank you, Flora, and good morning, everybody. Yesterday, we reported Q3 net earnings of $265 million or $5.72 per share which reflects the $340 million gain on the sale of the Arthur Gold Royalty as well as reflecting higher royalty revenues. G&A costs are up slightly related to onetime retirement payments and moving forward, we can expect a reduction in base salary costs of approximately 40%. The corporation also recognized a $64 million gain in other comprehensive earnings following the origin Triple Flag plan of arrangement.

Altius received cash of $29.5 million, Triple Flag shares, which were sold for proceeds of $37 million and shares in the new Orogen SpinCo. Increases in royalty revenue and adjusted EBITDA for Q3 reflects higher attributable Potash volumes and realized prices, higher copper stream deliveries and $3.4 million in interest and investment income.

These mounts are partially offset by lower incomes from iron ore. Growth in operating cash flow for the quarter was driven by higher royalty revenue and interest receipts offset by taxes paid and working capital changes. Q3 2025 adjusted net earnings of $0.17 per share is higher than the third quarter of 2024, with the main adjusting items being the gain on the sale of the Arthur Gold Royalty, foreign exchange and related tax impacts.

Following our two significant transactions in the quarter, the corporation considerably strengthens its balance sheet and liquidity profile. In Q3, we received USD 250 million of the $275 million purchase price of the Arthur Royalty. And in Q4, we can expect the remaining $25 million, net of any withholding taxes.

And this will be following the expiry of any challenge and appeal periods associated with our arbitration process. Current total liquidity available is approximately $540 million and this includes cash on hand, $125 million available under our revolver as well as $62.5 million potentially available as an accordion feature subject to certain criteria under the terms of our credit agreement.

During the quarter, we made debt repayments of $11 million. This consisted of $9 million voluntary repayments under revolver and a $2 million principal repayment on our term debt. We paid total cash dividends of $4.2 million and issued approximately 13,000 common shares under the dividend reinvestment plan.

In August, the corporation renewed its normal course issuer bid for another year and we purchased and canceled fixed 52,000 common shares for a total cost of $1.5 million. Yesterday, our Board of Directors approved a quarterly dividend of $0.10 per share to be paid to shareholders of record on November the 28 with a payment date of December 15.

Our renewable royalty business also remains well funded with increased market activity and new opportunities arising from development, construction and operating level investments. We expect to see continued portfolio growth over the coming quarters. Before I hand it over to Brian, I wanted to thank both Ben Lewis and Chad Wells for their guidance and support throughout my career.

Ben has been a mentor of mine since 2006 before I joined Altius in 2014. I look forward to working with them both in their advisory roles moving forward. And with that, I'll hand it over to Brian.

Thank you, Stef. Thank you, Flora, and to everyone for being with us today. I would like to start where Stef left off in thanking Ben and Chad for many years of dedicated service and comraderie as we work together to grow Altius from a small junior explorer to a well-diversified royalty company and highly profitable exploration business.

Your efforts is left Altius in far better shape than when you joined. While we wish them well in their requirements, we are delighted to be able to still avail their wisdom going forward and to continue to call them friends.

I know I'm speaking for the entire team, and congratulating Stephanie in her advancement and progression to the role of CFO, where we know she will continue to excel. As noted by Stephanie, Altius finds itself today in excellent financial health with a very strong balance sheet from which to base future potential growth.

The effort of figuring out how we might best deploy our capital resources is well underway, and our corporate development team is busily analyzing and comparing a host of interesting options. You will hear more on this effort in coming quarters, I'm sure. All this work certainly includes analysis of various external opportunities, we continue to keep sight of our already established internal growth profile that stems from existing assets and investments we made primarily through a less rosy or optimistic part of the mining industry cycle than we currently seem to be experiencing.

This past quarter saw an improvement in prices for many of the commodities we are exposed to, particularly for Potash, copper, U.S.-based electricity, gold and lithium, and this has naturally begun to translate into higher royalty revenue.

Prices only half the story at best, however, when considering royalty investments at Altius. We are far more intrigued and focused on the volume side of the equation and note that it is during the up parts of the cycle when sentiment and capital availability drive decisions by operators to expand existing operations and to build new ones.

We are seeing positive signals in this regard across our portfolio. This is a function of the very dedicated focus we placed over the past decade or more on selecting for assets that we felt will be the most likely investment candidate for these types of investments.

Essentially, this means attaching ourselves to assets in which existing production rates seem low as a function of resource size and/or in which cost structures and other development parameters are more favorable than most competing alternatives. Nowhere is this feature more prominent within our portfolio that with respect to our ultra long life, low cost, low due political risk, Potash mine exposures.

Global demand growth for Potash and ultimately, food continues to track along a well-established trend and the signals from our operators about continuing to hold, if not grow market share are currently amplifying. So while we still believe even after strong movement over the past two years, that current Potash prices do not readily incentivize a new wave of major growth investments, we do know that these must ultimately come and that our asset exposures represent the most advantaged opportunities to bring on the supplies that the world will need and need sooner than most observers currently anticipate.

Our continuing work to estimate incentivization pricing for both brownfields and brownfields potash development in Saskatchewan was recently informed by updated costs and time to completion estimates that BHP announced for its Jansen project.

This has led to our view that the gap between current prices and the levels required to keep the global potash market applied as further wide than recent years. Another area of potential future volume growth that we are monitoring closely is with respect to Lundin's current efforts to expand production levels at Chapada complex.

It has reported that it is exploring a relatively low capital cost project to incorporate higher-grade ore from its recent [ Telkwa ] discovery that would result in meaningful increase in final copper output.

We are expecting more details of this plan in the first quarter of next year and note that our copper stream rates extends to the [indiscernible]. We saw good news during the quarter from Silvercorp that it continues to track well in terms of cost and time line for its under construction Curipamba mine, where we hold a 2% NSR.

At spot prices, our annual revenue expectations and IRR estimates on the original investments have increased meaningfully. This is in large part driven by Curipamba strong precious metal content. Turning to our U.S.-based electricity royalties, we saw excellent progress during the quarter with continuing revenue ramp up as new projects continue to commission and our interconnection funding initiative began to deliver results.

Our portfolio now consists of 13 operating state royalties and 5 projects under construction by a very strong suite of counterparties. Last most importantly, we note that the freeze up in investment activity that has characterized the renewable electricity sector for most of this year, driven by heightened political and policy uncertainty has begun to thaw. This has led to the resumption of project sales activity for our developer partners and the associated derisking of our underlying royalties.

It has also led to increased industry project financing activity that has allowed us to increase our near-term expectations for deployment into new royalty investments. We anticipate being in a position to provide further detail on this front in our year-end update. At Arthur, we heard another very encouraging update from AGA that spoke to ongoing resource growth and project scope potential based on continuing positive drilling results.

This included references to growth and continuity for a particularly high-grade portion of the Merlin deposit that in previous studies was shown to give the potential for several years of plus 1 million-ounce per year production rates in the early part of the mine plan.

To the extent that this high-grade core continues to expand, the obvious implication is that there is increased potential for this type of production rate to continue for longer. At current prices, that production rate implies royalty revenue levels of potentially more than $30 million a year for our 0.5% NSR.

We look forward to learning more when AGA publishes the PFS this coming February. Turning next to CAMI. We congratulate Champion and partners, Nippon Steel and Sojitz on closing the first phase of their investment partnership during the quarter. We were also encouraged to learn of continuing progress with respect to engineering studies, environmental permitting, social licensing and efforts to attract infrastructure support associated with Canada's new push to strengthen its critical mineral sector.

As mentioned previously, this project has particular strategic importance to Nippon as it continues to execute a major investment program that is designed to modernize its steelmaking fleet to electric arc furnace-based technology, which is reliant on high purity inputs of the type CAMIs being designed to produce.

Our 3% CAMI royalty has the potential to become our single largest by revenue. Another encouraging feature of these stronger resource markets that sport noting is that it results in an increased availability of capital for explorers. There's more money available for the juniors.

This, in turn, naturally leads to increased drilling activity across our portfolio of early-stage royalty projects and therefore, enhance discovery potential and the possibility for more CAMI and silicon type events in our future.

I'll conclude by saying that while our efforts to source external opportunities have certainly notched up following the closing of the partial sale of our -- after royalty, -- we do not believe that our growth is at all dependent or solely dependent on this work. The work we did in selecting for higher probability expansion and new build opportunities over the past number of years, already solidifies our potential organic growth profile. We look forward to updating you further following Q4 and what we expect will be a particularly busy and exciting period of reporting from several of our royalty operator counterparties. And with that, I'll turn it over to your questions. Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Brian MacArthur from Raymond James.

I have 2 questions. My first one is just a technical one. On the $25 million payment from Franco, they talked about making it in Q4 and your wording sort of sounds like you think you'll get it into Q4, but there may be additional challenges. Are you seeing challenges? Or is that just being cautious language about when you get to $25 million in .

Well, the payment is due upon the expiry date of any challenge, assuming that no challenge has been made. And to date, we don't know of any challenge, and we're getting very close to that deadline for Anglo to make any challenge. But that's really -- it's a technical answer as well. It's a very formal trigger for that payment. And essentially, it means we've got to go past the appeal period, appeal is probably not exactly the right word, but challenge period and without challenging at that point, the payment is automatically due.

But that time period is in Q4, technically.

That is like within days.

Okay. Great. My other question just relates to GBR. There's a lot of discussion now about if I'm reading this correctly, that you're putting debt into a lot of these deals at the moment. When you do that, and you get your 7% return. Is there a length that you're entitled to a royalty? Or how are you thinking about that? Because again, my view would be royalties get a different multiple than doing debt yield at the end of the day.

Yes. No, I think you're exactly right in that assessment. So there is a dedicated debt financing facility in place that is being utilized to both these interconnection deposits. To date, there isn't a formal linkage to royalties. But at some point, these deposits that are currently fully refundable will turn to refundable deposits and then at that point, our payments are due.

So we do see a lot of opportunity there to continue these relationships with those groups as that shifts over and we can potentially convert some of the facilities to royalties in the future. But obviously, that's a 2-part equation on both sides would have to see something reasonable there. So I think it's probably better to look at it as yes, a nice sort of incremental source of revenue means of supporting our partners and others in the industry and certainly, hopefully, anyway, a means of relationship building tool that hopefully leads to additional deal flow. But for the meantime, it's, it's quite profitable and -- but I wouldn't treat it as sort of -- this is not long-term recurring revenue. These are relatively short duration instruments.

And your next question comes from the line of Orest Wowkodaw from Scotiabank.

Brian, could you please give us some color on what Altius plans to do with this cash windfall that's received from the recent transactions? I mean you're sitting with near enough $400 million plus of cash. How do you plan to deploy that moving forward? And do you see opportunities out there to deploy it? And if you do, I'd be curious sort of what commodities you're looking at right now. .

Probably I'll give you some color on the last part, but I think in terms of the kinds of commodity exposures we already had. We like those -- we're careful about managing balance across that, but we're not afraid to have something get bigger if that's where the opportunity unity rests. But we're not looking at any kind of big forays into anything exotic.

We like the kinds of commodity exposures that we have. As far as the deployment question goes, yes, there are potential opportunities out there and Mark and the team are pretty busy working through those. But you know us, we're going to be very patient and disciplined and take our time with sorting through things. And there's lots of opportunities with the fullness of time here. It could involve external opportunities that could also involve what we would call internal M&A, and that's using the buyback to increase our exposure to the existing growth profile that we already have in place.

So we're taking our time. We're going through what our alternatives are. And this will be done methodically in Altius like fashion. I mean, you know us the last time we had a pilot cash, and we talked about deploying it into new opportunities. We ended up waiting for, I think it was over 5 years until the window opened. So we're not afraid of that either. It's not the base assumption here, but yes, it's world-class problem, and we're working through it. It's a fun effort.

And I think everyone certainly is excited to have the shackles off a little bit in that anything we're looking at now as potential external opportunities, at least doesn't necessarily involve equity or the dilution of the -- what's already embedded as a growth profile within the company. So I'm not going to get any more specific on that, as you might imagine.

Well, I'll try anyways with a follow-up question. I totally understand that it takes time and these opportunities come up when they come up. But in terms of the potential to increase your buyback, is that something we could see sooner rather than later? .

I'll put it this way. When we're looking at external opportunities, everything has to measure up against what we see as the upside in terms of owning more of our own assets. So that's part of the mix right now. That's sort of the analysis that's going on. How does that opportunity compare to this one over here, this one over here and the one that's always available for us.

And some of that's going to be market circumstantial. I know it's been a strong market here, but markets have been known to be volatile in the past, and we're kind of excited about that volatility quite frankly, at Altius and ready to move. But yes. I think we're getting there. We're getting there in terms of priority lists. And just when we do make a priority list, it doesn't mean it's immediately actionable, but at least informs us to be ready employees to potentially do things, whether that's on the buyback or something external. So you did get a little more out of me, but that's it, I promise.

[Operator Instructions] And your next question comes from the line of Craig Hutchison from TD Cowen.

Maybe just a follow-up question from Brian's question earlier just on the GBR. And it seems like there's a lot of opportunity in this kind of deploying capital to support these refundable interconnection deposits. But I guess how big could this opportunity be? And you mentioned it's more short term in nature.

Can you give us a sense of how long you expect it to take to get repaid just looking at a 7% margin spread that seems to imply at least in my view, there is some risk here, giving us a pretty healthy margin. But just any kind of context in terms of the potential opportunity here those duration of the timing and the repayments of the refundable interconnection deposits. And just maybe if you can speak to why that margin is so high.

I wouldn't actually characterize it as a function of the investments being risky. In fact, it might be a little bit the other way. It's largely a function of how low our cost of capital is for that we're utilizing, because these are fully refundable deposits. We're not actually making the payments to the counterparties. These are being pledged on their behalf, but we retain full control.

So -- these are not -- it's not cash that's gone to a counterparty. So for example, if the counterparty got in trouble, these deposits are not -- essentially, they're not part of their, their asset mix, and we retain full control. So we've got quite a high rating attached to that facility.

And so yes, it's pretty low cost capital. And then on the other side, it does speak to pretty -- how would I put it? Like money is fairly expensive in the renewable sector. So a lot of these groups as well will be developers by nature, right? It's not going to be the next areas of the world that are looking for this money from us who can fund it from existing balance sheets.

These are groups that, quite frankly, would rather not have their own capital tied up with these deposits, they'd rather advance their projects on the ground. So the return what we're getting paid to provide these facilities is a function of more difficult market conditions, particularly for equity type capital and just a prioritization of uses of capital by some of these groups, this isn't going to be out there for extended periods of time.

So the cost is it just makes sense for them. It's what the market is bearing right now. If you go further with it and think more to what we're -- I guess, more focused on, which is acquiring long-term royalty type interests, recurring revenue streams, optionality, all that sort of thing. The same can be true like returns, our expected returns have edged up in the last while. And that's -- it's largely a function, just look at the equity markets in the renewable space right now.

It's not particularly strong, although those seem to be improving. And I'll be honest, on the other hand, and this is what's remarkable is that there is some reticence amongst lending groups and banks because they actually fear repercussions from the U.S. administration about being seem to be supportive of the industry. So quite a wild backdrop really, but if you've got conviction long-term belief what it results in is competing forms of capital are scarcer now than they would have been and returns have adjusted accordingly.

And the other thing that's remarkable about this is that the actual fundamental backdrop is really strong. So you've got these challenging market conditions and reluctance on the part of competing forms of capital against what is probably the strongest electricity markets that anyone who's an investor has ever seen in the U.S. market.

And the gap that's sort of how that gap is, in some ways, being filled is through -- it's the end users of the power. It's the buyers of the power who are stepping up and signing quite long term above market priced contracts to buy the electricity. And so that's sort of what stepped in to fill the hole that was created when sort of tax credits and all those sorts of benefits that used to be part of the economic mix for these projects has gone away.

What's happened is a quite capitalist response in that the people who actually need the power are filling the hole and just providing whatever price is needed to get the power made. And so on that hand, it's extremely bullish conditions out there, but remarkably weak financing conditions. So quite an interesting to position there, but I love it.

There are no further questions at this time. Ms. Wood, please proceed.

Thank you, Ina. We do actually have a question from a shareholder who e-mailed. Thank you for doing that, by the way. And it's about the Labrador Trough high-grade low maturity iron ore -- and the first part of it is really about the outlook, especially in light of Simandou coming on. And the second part is do we have any update on Julienne Lake.

Second part is easy, no real update there. And in fact, there was a recent change in government in -- within Newfoundland, and this is obviously the process that I think is being referred to as proposals that we've made to the proper provincial governments around advancing or developing the Julienne Lake deposit that it controls. So we don't have the results of that process in front of us yet and it may take a little time for the new government to get their heads around what's going on there, but we'll certainly be updating whenever we do.

The Simandou question, there's a little bit of confusion, I think, out there in the market with respect to that. It's not actually designed to produce ultra-high purity DR-grade iron ore. There's talk of that potentially being some of the mix down the road. But really what it is, it's more of the higher grade end of the blast furnace, spectrum. And it's sort of -- it's a function of how rapidly overall grades are declining in Australia, I would say, I think there's even pushes now to reduce the benchmark from 62 down to 61, all sorts of challenges from the established producers there that are emerging and trying to meet basic spec for blast furnace grade.

So as I understand that anyway, Simandou is meant to be -- that continuum for blast furnace grade would be sort of, say, 58% to 65%, and that's meant to improve Rio's contribution on the higher end of that spectrum and to bring their overall to sort of arrest the overall grade decline they've been dealing with.

That's good. I think there's no further questions. So we'd like to thank everybody again for joining us, and we look forward to speaking with you for Q4.

Thank you, everyone. Congratulations first one under your belt.

Thank you. Thanks, everybody, for joining.

And this concludes today's call. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Altius Minerals Q2 2025 Conference Call and Webcast. [Operator Instructions] Also note that this call is being recorded on Tuesday, August 12, 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to Flora Wood. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Sylvie. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q2 conference call. Our press release and quarterly filings came out yesterday after the close and are available on our website. This event is being webcast live, and you'll be able to access a replay of the call along with the presentation slides that have been added to our website at altiusminerals.com. Brian Dalton, CEO; and Ben Lewis, CFO, are both speakers on the call.

The forward-looking statement on Slide 2 applies to everything we say both in our formal remarks and during the Q&A session. And with that, Ben is up first to take us through the numbers.

Thank you, Flora, and good morning, everyone. Royalty revenue for Q2 2025 was $12.7 million. compared to $20.4 million in Q2 2024. Adjusted EBITDA for the 3 months ended June 30, 2025, was $7.5 million compared to $14.5 million for the prior year quarter. In the current quarter, the decrease in both revenue and adjusted EBITDA reflect lower attributable potash volumes and lower dividends from iron ore, partially offset by higher base metal prices.

Potash attributable royalty volumes have now -- have been low relative to Nutrien and Mosaic reported volumes, partially from the split between units at Rocanville and from maintenance turnarounds that occurred during the first half of the year. Both Nutrien and Mosaic have increased their production guidance for the year. Revenue in the prior year quarter also included nonrecurring investment income of $3.6 million related to the settlement of a loan receivable.

Q2' '25 adjusted operating cash flow of $4.7 million compares to $8.3 million in Q2 last year. The decrease is largely reflective of lower royalty revenue receipts. Net earnings for the second quarter of $5.5 million or $0.12 per share compares to net earnings of $8.3 million or $0.18 per share in Q2 2024. Net earnings reflects lower revenues, partially offset by lower costs and expenses, amortization and interest. Q2 2025 adjusted net earnings of $0.03 per share is lower than the second quarter of 2024, with the main adjustment items being foreign exchange and a $1.8 million income tax recovery relating to the recognition of certain tax losses.

I'll now turn to capital allocation and liquidity. During the quarter, we made scheduled debt repayments of $2.0 million, paid total cash dividends of $3.8 million and issued a little over 14,000 common shares valued at approximately $381,000 under the corporation's dividend reinvestment plan. There were no shares repurchased in Q2 as the corporation had imposed an internal trading blackout on its shares while a sales process involving the Silicon royalty was ongoing.

The Board of Directors also declared a quarterly dividend of $0.10 per share, which represents an increase of 11% over recent quarterly amounts and will be paid to shareholders of record on August 29, 2025, with the payment date of September 15, 2025. At June 30, our current liquidity consisted of $11 million in cash as well as $116 million in unused revolver available. Following the sale of the 1% Silicon royalty and the closing of the Triple Flag acquisition of Orogen, the corporation has considerably strengthened its balance sheet and liquidity profile.

Cash after taxes and fees payable to financial and legal advisers is approximately $360 million, with total liquidity increasing to $540 million. This includes $116 million available under the revolving credit facility noted above as well as $62.5 million potentially available as an accordion feature under our debt, subject to certain criteria.

Our renewable royalty business also remains well funded through its partnership with Northampton and also through cash on hand held at both the ARR and GBR levels. At June 30, ARR had cash of approximately USD 32 million, and the GBR joint venture had cash of approximately $35 million. along with available liquidity of approximately USD 85 million under its credit facilities.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Brian to discuss the quarter's significant highlights.

Thank you, Ben and Flora, and thanks, everyone, for being with us here today. The most significant highlights since we came together last was certainly our announced sale of 2/3 or 1% portion of our original 1.5% NSR royalty related to the Silicon or as it is now known, the Arthur Gold Project, Franco-Nevada. With this transaction, we believe that we struck an appropriate balance between crystallizing material value for our shareholders from this exciting discovery while retaining long-term exposure to its continuing upside potential.

The decision to retain part of the royalty also marks the addition of a component of gold's exposure to our diversified portfolio. Combined with the slightly earlier sale of our major shareholding in Orogen Royalties, who owned a 1% royalty over Silicon, we now have a radically transformed balance sheet as well as a confirmed new top-tier royalty within our long-term portfolio. In base and battery metals, we continue to see organic growth developments across several assets.

Voisey's Bay continues to ramp up nickel, copper and cobalt production following the recent completion of construction at the Reid Brook and Eastern Deeps deposits. In lithium, Grota do Cirilo Stage 2 expansion is underway. Mariana has begun to ramp up and Tres Quebradas is scheduled for construction completion later this year. The Curipamba gold, silver, zinc mine is under construction with first production expected late next year. On that front, it is worth noting that around half and perhaps more than half at current prices of the NSR value for this mine is expected to stem from precious metals.

Finally, in base metals, we were very pleased this quarter to learn of the preliminary plans that have been outlined for the expansion of production at Chapada. Lundin Mining has noted that a PFS and permitting is underway to incorporate higher-grade ores from the recently discovered and nearby Sauva deposit into the broader Chapada district mining plan, with the potential to result in an overall increase in copper production by approximately 50%.

In potash, we heard quite bullish second quarter reporting from both of our royalty mine operators. Each of these have indicated very strong market fundamentals and expectations for a new record in global potash demand this year. This is occurring against the backdrop of supply constraints in several competing production regions, and This combination has led to firmer pricing through the first half of the year. While volumes from our royalty mines were impacted by scheduled maintenance downtime in the second quarter, both operators continue to expect to meet or exceed production and sales guidance on a full year basis, while also completing incremental capacity additions.

We'll also remind here that we typically experience an embedded approximately 1 quarter lag in pricing realization across these royalties. We also noted an announcement related to BHP's Jansen project this quarter, which reported upon a delay in first production and higher capital costs for its Phase 1 mine, together with indications of further expected delays and cost increases for its Phase 2 expansion plan. This has potential material implications for near- to medium-term supply-demand balances and also provides longer-term benchmarking support for incentive pricing calculations. A steadily compounding market growth drives an approaching need for major global production capacity additions, particularly from the end of this decade onwards.

Turning to ARR. The increase in royalty revenue this quarter reflects organic growth in the portfolio as certain development stage roles ramped up operations over the last year with these including Canyon Wind, JayHawk, El Sauz and Young Wind. Angelo Solar royalty has also begun contributing revenue now as well. Existing development partners, including Enbridge, [ Hexicon, ] Nova and Nokomis continue to advance multiple projects in their portfolios, and these should allow us to remain on track along our expected growth trajectory.

The GBR portfolio now represents total potential electricity generating capacity in excess of 18,500 megawatts, including 13 operational royalties totaling approximately 2,900 megawatts and 5 additional projects under construction totaling 1,500 megawatts that are currently projected to reach commercial operations by the end of next year.

Looking to deployment in new royalties and ARR. During the first half of 2025, the renewable industry was in a state of great uncertainty as a result of pending policy changes, specifically as it relates to the phaseout of tax incentives regarding renewable energy development. As a result, most operators and renewable investors took a wait-and-see approach with very few transactions of any type closing in the industry during the first 6 months of 2025.

In early July, the new legislation in the U.S. did provide clarity around time lines for the phaseout of tax incentives such that market participants can now better make investment decisions. Despite the accelerated phaseout of tax credits built into the new bill, there remains a robust demand for renewable power in the U.S. The demand for energy sources will continue to drive demand for renewable energy in the near term and power pricing is quickly adjusting to fill the gap left from the tax credit phaseout.

The renewable industry has already seen strong PPA price escalation, largely due to increased demand from technology companies accelerating the build out of data centers for AI. GBR also continues to leverage the grid interconnection bottlenecks within certain regions of the U.S. by financing refundable interconnection deposits on late-stage development projects.

For this, it is using a dedicated GBR level debt facility that allows it to generate a positive margin and develop further relationships within the sector that believes will result in additional royalty investment opportunities as projects advance through interconnection approval processes. It is currently in the process of deploying meaningful amounts of capital into this initiative, and we will expect to be in a position to report further on this next quarter.

In iron ore, we have seen some production improvement begin to take hold at IOC as its capital reinvestment initiatives over the past few years begin to deliver results. Dividends remain somewhat subdued as this increased capital investment program continues. However, we are encouraged by the longer-term benefit potential. Champion and its new Japanese partners, Nippon Steel and Sojitz announced the completion of the partnership agreement concerning the development of the Kami project in July.

The partners also continue to advance the project along several lines, including detailed engineering in support of the ongoing feasibility study, environmental permitting, aboriginal and other stakeholder agreements and discussions around potential government supports related to the designation of Kami's expected high-purity product under critical minerals frameworks.

We believe it is also noteworthy that Nippon announced in late May, the sanctioning of a USD 6 billion investment to convert more of its traditional blast furnace steelmaking units in Japan to electric arc furnace space plants. These will require high purity iron ore inputs of the type that Kami is being designed to produce. In June, Altius' PG team submitted a detailed proposal as part of the Julienne Lake mineral land bid process being undertaken by the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

The Julienne Lake deposit is a large undeveloped high-grade iron ore deposit located approximately 25 kilometers northeast of the town of Labrador City. Altius holds claims that are contiguous with the EML and that cover extensions of the deposit. Moreover, Altius recently completed preliminary metallurgical test work in order to test the ability of the deposit to yield direct reduction grade iron ore concentrate, which yielded positive results.

Elsewhere in PG, several new initiatives across select jurisdictions continue to advance as we seek to add new projects both directly and through partnerships. More on these efforts in quarters to come as the team looks to continue to execute on its long-term strategies and replicate the recent successes that has demonstrated at Silicon and Kami.

Lastly, a few preemptory words on capital allocation before we turn to your questions. This was an important and fun discussion topic at our Board meeting yesterday. The gross cash consideration of $375 million from our partial sale of the Silicon royalty, combined with proceeds of $67 million from the sale of our interest in Orogen Royalties for Triple Flag has increased our total net cash position to more than $360 million and our total available liquidity to more than $0.5 billion.

This provides us with considerable capital allocation flexibility and opportunity, and the team is now happily tasked with evaluating and ranking our various options, ranging across the spectrum of dividends, debt repayment, share count reduction, and external acquisition opportunities. Amongst these, we are currently primarily focused on comparing the merits of share repurchases or as we like to call it, internal M&A as well as external M&A possibilities.

In evaluating the latter, we will continue to exercise discipline and we will remind or perhaps caution shareholders of the fact that we have within our history, a track record of patiently sitting on large cash positions for extended periods until the right opportunities emerge. It is worth noting, however, that our ability to now compete cash-based acquisitions without requiring new share issuances provides us with a somewhat broader purview of possibilities than we have had in quite some time.

This is a function of the ability to avoid the factoring in of dilution to embedded portfolio option values as part of our analysis process. Our corporate development team is obviously happy about gaining this broader lens and are expecting a very busy autumn and beyond in completing evaluation and analysis of potential opportunities. We can also guide that at this time, there is little current emphasis or consideration being placed on issuing a special dividend or on becoming more aggressive with debt repayment.

That said, as Ben noted, we did increase our regular dividend last night, and we will likely eliminate the modest amount outstanding under our revolving component of our credit facilities. I'll end by saying that this was certainly one of the most momentous quarters in our now almost 29-year history as a public company. I'm very proud to work within our team, and I'm very much looking forward to the times ahead as we continue to work hard to build on this momentum and special base of assets on behalf of our shareholders. Thank you.

And with that, I will open up to questions, please.

Thank you -- go ahead, Ms. Wood.

Thank you, Sylvie. I know you opened my line. We're having problems with people trying to dial in, and I know they've been unable to. So if we can just delay for a minute. And in the meantime, Brian, I do have a question that got e-mailed to us from Tyler, a shareholder. So I'll just start with that, which is around the time remaining until the NCIB expires August 21. He is wondering given the daily purchase limits under the TSX rules based on daily trading volume, would the company ever consider a substantial issuer bid as a way to deploy more capital into buybacks more quickly?

Would we ever consider a substantial issuer bid? The answer is most certainly yes. In the time remaining before our next NCIB renewal, which is this month, no.

Okay. I got one more. Sorry, we're just trying to resolve our line problem here. So Tyler is also noticing that GBR had drawn and deployed a significant amount from the interconnection credit facility subsequent to the quarter. And he's wondering is that connected to the OBB and the developers trying to secure favorable positions in the queue? And also, is there a royalty angle with these loans?

Yes. Thanks for the question. I believe I largely addressed that in the prepared remarks, but I would say no, not particularly related to new legislation. This would be interconnection deposit schedules that would have certainly predated that the new legislation. So these would be just positions that have to be funded in order to hold against a lot of these discussions have been ongoing for some time. And sorry, what was the second part of the question?

He was just asking if there was a royalty angle...

In some cases, generally speaking, I think one of the things that we're excited about with this new interconnection funding process is that it is working very well in terms of building new relationships. So obviously, as a project, if somebody is willing to proceed and to fund interconnection deposits, there's future steps, which include obviously construction and building of the project. So we do have these relationships. I think the team is doing a really good job of demonstrating their innovation and ability to support the industry more broadly.

So it's not that -- so we're not trying to make it that direct, at least not at this point, but we do believe a lot of goodwill is being built up, and we are seeing a lot more opportunity just because yes, the team is building relationships and earning a place in the industry as a trusted partner. So I would say that's certainly one of the goals of the whole initiative.

[Operator Instructions] And your next question will be from Craig Hutchison at TD.

And just in terms of the use of proceeds, are you guys seeing opportunities to acquire producing assets in the base metal world? Or are you seeing more opportunity in terms of development stage assets?

All of the above, and I'm probably not going to get much more specific in that, Craig, as it's a limited landscape out there, and so we're not going to be tipping our hands on anything we might be doing or not doing, but I guarantee this much. We won't be rash. We're going to be our typical patient boring frustrating [indiscernible].

Okay. Maybe in terms of potash volumes, it was a bit lower this quarter because of some maintenance work. But are you seeing a pickup in terms of volumes here heading into Q3 based on what you know from the existing royalty counterparties?

Our reporting is typically more after the fact with those groups. So really, we can only, at this point, I lean on the public statements. But yes, both of the operators were really bullish sounding in their own quarterly reporting Nutrien upped its guidance. Order books are full beyond full. There's commentary around the market actually probably going to have unmet demand this year.

So it seems like they're certainly doing everything they possibly can to build up production. Mosaic talked a fair bit about a new project that they have up on top side at the mine around processing. They think that, that can give them an extra 400,000 tons incrementally. But look, I can only read what everyone else can read and listen to what everyone else can listen to.

But it feels like these guys are sensing an opportunity, probably sensing it even greater now that BHP seems to be falling out of bed a little bit with Jansen. And I would be very surprised if they're not in the near term and probably more broadly in the medium term, if they're not going to flex their muscles and do what they've always done, and then that's like earn market share when the opportunity presents because they've got the best assets in the business.

Okay. And maybe just one last one for me. Just in terms of the renewables business. I mean, are you able to provide sort of any kind of goalposts in terms of the growth rate we should expect here in the sort of back half of this year and heading into next year?

Flora, you might want to help me with that in terms of what we've got published. We do have -- we have in the past, I know, put out sort of projected revenue growth, and that's based on really just the development pipeline that -- so these are already funded investments and information we've gotten from operators around construction time lines and whatnot. I don't know what the growth rate would be, but Flora, maybe you can help me out with that either here or in a subsequent follow-up.

But yes, everything seems largely on track. Look, the key here is that if you're actually at the point where you've got interconnection and obviously, the projects that we're talking about over the next 1 or 2 years, I mean construction do have that. There's literally insatiable demand for the power on the other end, and you can pretty much name your price in terms of contracted prices and durations right now. But the interconnection problem in the U.S. is not just in getting tied to the grid.

I think an even bigger problem is emerging from large load customers who are trying to tie on to the grid. Now they're getting refused because there just isn't enough power. So it's both sides. There's a backlog of projects trying to link to the grid nand an even backlog -- a bigger backlog of customers trying to get access to power. So it's pretty wild and crazy. I mean if you look at the broader renewable landscape, particularly the equity valuations in the public markets, I think the sky was falling. But at its fundamental hearts, these are power producers. Nobody who's operating in the industry has seen anything like the current environment in terms of demand for what they produce.

The challenge is what sits in the middle and just making all connect and happen. So I don't know if I've ever seen anything disconnected in terms of market apathy. And in fact, I mean downright like hostility towards a sector, fear amongst investors of political backlash are being invested in the sector. I mean these are the kinds of backdrop situations that you're out there. And yes, name your price if you can bring the power to the market. It's pretty wild and crazy. It's like it's hard to call a contrarian when the supply/demand situation is so robust. But as far as sentiment goes, wow, polar opposite. It's really fun. Sorry, I might have got off on a tangent there.

[Operator Instructions] At this time, we have no more on the phone.

Sylvie, can you hear me? I'll read a couple more that we've got. And Craig, I'll also give you a call just on both deployment and your question around ballpark expectations. So there's a question from Carey MacRury at Canaccord. This is sort of a follow-on to what Craig asked. And knowing you don't want to get into detail on development stage versus operating, what about preferred commodities for new deployment?

I'm going to pass on that one, too.

Okay. Luckily for you, there's more. So Adrian Day at [ Adrian Day ] Asset Management has a couple of questions around Silicon. So first one, any expectations on when to expect the final award on the arbitration?

I hesitate to guess because any guess I've ever made up to this point has usually been pretty wrong, although I think it may be close. We have been asked to submit payments to the arbitrators quite recently. And it was -- I think the quote from the arbitration center was final payments. So I don't know, I assume that means that the award is very close here. It presumes, I guess, that they wrapped up their work and their billings anyway or at least they've predicted the remaining amount. So who knows, but some signals anyway that it may be close.

Excellent. The comment that you made around retaining the 0.5% NSR on Silicon, you noted the addition of precious metals as a component to the portfolio. Adrian asked, are you implying you might decide to keep precious metal royalties from your future discoveries? Or might you even seek out new precious metal royalties?

I think all of the above that we used to be -- we used to look at ourselves as sort of having 4 different pillars or verticals or whatever the term people like is precious metals with the addition of Silicon. And quite frankly, as [indiscernible] comes on right now, that's basically a gold mine of copper credit versus what we thought we were buying, which was a copper gold credit. So we're going to continue to explore in our PG business for gold as well as everything else. That's always been the case because the competitive dynamics of buying precious metal royalties don't exist there.

And in fact, they tend to be really attractive targets for the PG team just because such a widd customer base available for them. Yes, open-minded to acquiring. I think something would have to be we'd have to probably find something that we feel like we have some kind of a technical edge on to be successful if it came down to acquiring more precious metal royalties because we're not going to compete on cost of capital relative to the more precious metal-focused peers.

But look, it's a new pillar. So for sure, we're more open-minded to it than we would have been. I mean, again, we've never been antiprecious metals. We've always just said that it can't really be a serious focus for us because we're not going to be competitive on a cost of capital basis.

That's really what it's been about. It's not like we don't want to be gold -- have gold in our system. And we don't have the same issue that, say, a precious metals royalty company has in worrying about losing their multiple because they've got too much nonprecious metal components. The inverse isn't true, where -- yes, it's just -- so yes, let's be realistic as well would be my answer.

And at this time, Ms. Wood, we have no other questions from the phone lines. Please proceed.

Thank you, Sylvie, and thank you to everybody on the call and for your questions, and we'll look forward to talking to you for Q3.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you. 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 your lines.