Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today for 5E Advanced Materials special Conference Call Shareholder Update, following last week's announcement that the company has completed its acquisition of the assets and operations of Searles Valley Minerals. During today's call, management will reference company's annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2026. Current report on Form 8-K filed with the SEC on September 15, 2026, including the Asset Purchase Agreement and press release furnished as exhibits. Each of which is available in the investor relations section of the company's website. For copies of these materials, you may also contact PRA Communications at team@pracommunication.com. As a reminder, remarks made on today's conference call will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor Provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding our business strategy, plans, goals, and objectives, the completed acquisition of the assets and operations of Searles Valley Minerals, the expected benefits of the acquisition, including the company's transition to revenue-generating production, management plans for the acquired operations, including the contracting of production, cost reduction, and targeted financial performance. The company's base plan and upside case Adjusted EBITDA targets, financing plans, including the bridge facility and the evaluation of additional financing alternatives, the company's liquidity and expectations regarding the timing and terms on which it may raise capital. The potential future of evaluation or development of tungsten, sulfate of potash, lithium, borates expansion and opportunities. Potential monetization of non-core assets, third party and management projections of market supply, demand, and pricing, and the continued advancement of the Fort Cady project. These statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and are based on currently available information involving risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from those projected or discussed. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from these forward-looking statements is contained in our disclosure and public filings with the SEC, including the Form 8-Ks filed in the connection with this transaction on September 15, 2026 and October 1, 2026, and our most recent annual report on Form 10-K. The company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements as except required by law. Today's call may also include a discussion of non-GAAP financial measures as the term is defined in Regulation G, including Adjusted EBITDA and the future annualized Adjusted EBITDA targets. Non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered in isolation from or a substitute for financial information presented in compliance with the GAAP. The reconciliation of the company's non-GAAP financial measures guidance to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures cannot be provided without unreasonable efforts and are not provided herein because of the inherent difficulty in forecasting and quantifying certain amounts that are necessary for such reconciliations, the amount of which could be material. Today's call may includes also forward-looking statement reference to mineral resources, mineral reserves, and other scientific and technical information. This information has not been prepared in accordance with Subpart 1300 of Regulation S-K, and we do warrant that any information is compliant under S-K 1300. We encourage you to reference the full technical support and report and the related summary once filed with the SEC. This afternoon's conference call will be hosted by 5E's Chief Executive Officer, Paul Weibel. Management will first lead off the call by making prepared comments, after which we will open the call to your questions. I'll now turn the call over to Paul. Paul? Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today and thank you for making time for what we believe is one of the most important events in this company's history. Last week, we announced that we have completed our acquisition of the assets and operations of Searles Valley Minerals. The purchase was completed through a court-supervised sale process under Section 363 of the US Bankruptcy Code, following entry of a sale order by the bankruptcy court in satisfaction of other customary closing conditions. This transaction transforms 5E from a pre-revenue development company into a revenue-generating American producer of boron and critical minerals. There are two things I want shareholders to take away from today's call. First, we acquired an operating business where we see a clear path towards approximately $40 million of steady-state consolidated Adjusted EBITDA through three identifiable operating levers. Price, cost, and volume. Second, we acquired a much broader critical mineral platform with additional opportunities in borates, lithium, sulfate of potash, and tungsten that are not included in that base plan. That combination, an operating reset which we believe we can execute today, and significant optionality beyond the base plan is what makes this transaction so important for 5E. In the simplest terms, up until last week, 5E was a company with a significant boron deposit working towards commercial production at Fort Cady. With the completion of this transaction, we are now also the operator of a working industrial minerals complex that produced more than 1 million short tons of borates, salt, sodium sulfate, and soda ash in its last fiscal year. While we are excited about the base industrial minerals business we have acquired, we view this acquisition as a critical mineral platform that in addition to the boron, includes lithium, SOP, and tungsten, which we'll discuss in detail later. As of today, we have two Southern California production complexes, 129 miles apart, operating under one integrated commercial organization with one mission, secure domestic supply of critical minerals. Let me walk through the transaction itself before I get into the rationale for the transaction and provide a more detailed introduction of Searles Valley Minerals. The acquisition closed last Thursday, following entry of a sale order by the bankruptcy court and satisfaction of other customary closing conditions. Total consideration was comprised of $3.4 million in cash, plus 8.3 million shares of our common stock, and an unsecured five year promissory note of approximately $6.2 million, and the assumption of specified liabilities. I want to be direct about one point here because it matters. Identified legacy environmental liabilities, including CARB greenhouse gas allowance obligations, remained with the seller's estate under the transaction structure. Those liabilities did not transfer to 5E, and with the bankruptcy sale order and the state's resolution with CARB, 5E received a fresh start with the state of California and will be treated as a new covered entity within the Cap-and-Invest program. This was intentional and a specific term for this transaction, not an afterthought. The clean start goes well beyond the CARB. This was a Section 363 asset purchase, not an acquisition of the old SVM corporate balance sheet. We acquired the operating assets, selected only the contracts we desired, and assumed only specified liabilities. The legacy debt capital structure, historical creditor, and workers' compensation claims, and other excluded liabilities remain with the bankrupt estate, while many uneconomic legacy contracts were rejected or left behind through the bankruptcy process. We believe we are taking over an industrial and critical mineral platform that is substantially cleansed of the leverage and contractual overhang of the predecessor. That platform includes three processing sites, 54 MW of on-site cogeneration capacity, the Trona Railroad, the water utility, mineral tenure and brine rights, real property, wells, pipelines, utilities, laboratories, equipment, and an experienced workforce. This is infrastructure built over generations with hundreds of millions of dollars of historical capital invested. With total consideration paid for the acquisition equal to approximately $22.9 million when measured against SVM's gross fixed assets, the transaction value is approximately $0.05 on the dollar before assigning any value to the mineral resource base or the optionality we'll discuss today. Put simply, we bought the operating platform, not the old balance sheet. I also want to take a moment to thank the Searles Valley Minerals team, including Dennis Cruise and his colleagues, for their partnership throughout this process, along with the previous owner of Searles Valley Minerals, who's now 5E's third largest shareholder. With this closing, we have inherited an experienced, capable operating workforce of approximately 257 employees, and we are now looking forward to working alongside them, restoring all borate operations to scale, and expanding the critical minerals portfolio. So why are we doing this? For years, 5E's mission has been to secure a domestic supply of boron, which the United States Department of the Interior added to its Critical Minerals List last year, along with other adjacent critical industrial minerals. This transaction advances that mission immediately. There is more than 150 years of production heritage at Searles Lake, low disturbance solution mining with roughly 75% of depleted brine returned to the lake bed, and integrated logistics through short line rail with access to the Port of Long Beach. Just as important, we know this market. Through our operations at Fort Cady, we have already qualified our boric acid with many customers across multiple market segments, and our commercial plan is grounded in the structure of the borate market itself, with significant global borate producers, Rio Tinto U.S. Borax, and Eti Maden, operating at what we believe is high utilization and no material capacity additions expected over the medium term. This acquisition will advance 5E to become yet another significant borate producer in that market and the only American-owned operator. As a refresher for newcomers to the borate market, the borate market has two primary global producers. Boron is irreplaceable in glass, fertilizers as a micronutrient, insulation, and critical to nuclear energy, semiconductors, defense, and permanent magnets. An independent supply and demand study recently completed in August projects that demand will continue to exceed supply through 2032, with market pricing re-rating as utilization holds above roughly 90% tightness threshold. While 5E has historically discussed the boric acid market, Searles Valley's primary borate product is borax pentahydrate, more commonly known as V-BOR for hosting five molecules of water. There are four types of minerals where borates are economically extracted, and 5E now holds both tincal and colemanite with the ability to produce V-BOR, boric acid, and various borate derivatives. What is incredibly important to note is that for V-BOR, there were only three producers of significance in the world, Eti, Rio, and SVM. This is a market that is already tight, yet continues to grow. While Eti and Rio currently produce approximately 90% of global V-BOR supply, both currently account for approximately 65% of global boric acid supply. There is an incremental conversion cost to convert V-BOR to boric acid, thus creating what we believe is a competitive advantage relative to other boric acid producers and providing 5E, Eti, and Rio these lower cost options to produce boric acid. Given the structural realities of the V-BOR market, 5E will and has entered into new offtake agreements at market-based pricing that reflect current supply and demand conditions. In practice, the re-contracting at market-based pricing during a time in which we believe utilization is hitting approximately 90% is one of the more immediate ways we anticipate this transaction will create value, and I want to credit 5E's commercial team and our understanding of supply, demand in the borate market for our initial success here. During the bankruptcy process, we set up replacement contracts contingent on a successful acquisition. We see these contracts as the single biggest lever driving value on a go-forward basis. We believe the supply and demand chart as seen on the screen is being realized in real-time and has been executed as part of 5E's acquisition strategy. Before we get into the numbers, let me formally introduce Searles Valley Minerals and highlight the critical mineral firepower these assets possess. While the headline of approximately 9,000 acres and operating infrastructure is true, it is an understatement of the actual infrastructure and capabilities we have acquired. Searles Valley sits approximately 40 miles Southwest of Death Valley, tucked into the southeast corner of the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountain range. Mineral tenure and rights are secured through fee-based land where approximately 25% of minerals are conveyed through real property. The remainder of the minerals sit on federal BLM land where long-term leases secure mineral tenure with a negotiated 5% royalty as compensation paid to the BLM for the mineral tenure. Because of the 25% to 75% split of fee property relative to the BLM land, SVM remits a 3.75% royalty to BLM. Searles Lake is a dry lakebed with three geological zones. The upper salt zone is approximately 70 feet deep and is rich in Tincal Brines where the borates are extracted. The lower salt zone includes Trona and borates, which is further separated by a mud layer where Trona-rich minerals extend to depths of approximately 500 feet. Extraction occurs through warm solution mining at approximately 5,000 gallons per minute using heated water. This is different than Fort Cady's operation in that the wells are materially shallower, less expensive to drill, and materials of construction are exponentially simpler as there are no leaching reagents. Infrastructure includes three chemical plants. Today, the Argus plant, which has historically produced hundreds of thousands of tons of soda ash, will remain idled except the SAC plant, which we will discuss here shortly. Plant number two is Trona, which has capacity to produce 45,000 tons of boric acid annually, along with two furnaces to produce anhydrous borax and a sulfate of potash plant that was built in 2018. The facilities at Trona are currently idled. However, we have plans to restart boric acid as production ramps. The Westend facility remains operational today, which is where the plant can produce up to 135,000 tons of V-BOR and has capacity to produce about 140,000 tons of sodium sulfate. There is a bolt-on industrial salt operation that historically produced 190,000 tons and services customers with reputable and strong brands in oil and gas. Additionally, SVM does have an operational direct lithium extraction pilot plant, and the complex power is supplied via two twin boilers that operate on natural gas and can each push 27 MW of power. The company plans to fully decouple from the SoCal Edison grid in the near term. Once we have decoupled from the grid, we believe this will generate meaningful savings with a positive impact to OpEx and Adjusted EBITDA. In addition to the mining, chemical plant, and power infrastructure, the acquisition includes a water utility provider, along with the Trona Railroad, which supplies product back and forth to the Union Pacific railroad line, providing logistical access at global scale. One point of scale is worth emphasizing. This is not a short-life turnaround asset. Though the assets are generating revenue from minerals today, and we have commenced a work stream for an S-K 1300 technical report, today we do not have a formal mineral resource and reserve statement that complies with S-K 13 standards. However, our filed transaction materials estimate Searles Lake at a roughly 200-year resource life based on current extraction rates. Fort Cady adds the largest reported borate resource in the U.S. with 28.3 million short tons of measured and indicated boric acid resources, while its phase I reserves alone support a technical report with a 37 and a half year mine life. We now have two multi-generational Southern California boron resources inside one company. That combination gives 5E one of the most strategically significant boron resource positions outside of Turkey, together with existing processing, power, rail, water, and logistics infrastructure that would be extraordinarily difficult and costly to replicate today. That leads me to the plan. This is a reset-based business, and we are approaching it as operators. With this closing, we have now recapitalized an operation that entered Chapter 11 without access to capital and which was burdened by legacy liabilities. Going forward, boron is not a byproduct for us. It is core to the mission, and we will be bringing our own commercial organization and customer relationships to recontract production at market-based pricing. Our plan runs on three levers. The first is price. Under prior ownership, annualized V-BOR production stood at approximately 82,000 short tons per year with a realized V-BOR netback of $424 per short ton under the legacy contracts. These legacy contracts are no longer valid contracts and have been rejected by the bankruptcy process. These contracts generated approximately $35 million in V-BOR revenue for the legacy business. During the bankruptcy process, we stood up replacement contracts contingent on a successful asset acquisition. That condition precedent has been met, and we now have new, valid contracts that are expected to yield 5E a V-BOR netback at least 65% higher than prior contracted pricing of the legacy business on a per short ton basis. The new contracts are structured as take-or-pay, include fixed pricing, and are repriced at market. We expect to remain disciplined on price, and our commercial team is currently in the market at higher prices than our initial offtake agreements we have executed prior to the acquisition. Beginning on day one and assuming the same annualized short ton production schedule, 5E's Searles Valley Minerals targets approximately $57 million in annual V-BOR revenue. Our expectation is that out of the gate, we will run at the current annualized rates, and with operational improvements by restarting the SAC plant, our V-BOR production for the remaining fiscal year targets 95,000 to 100,000 tons of V-BOR. Given the new contracting structure, we expect to bank an incremental $22 million in V-BOR relative to our base plan, with the majority of output derived from a limited number of creditworthy customers and segmenting the sales mix towards higher-value products. The second lever is cost, which we have already substantially achieved, where we have rejected many legacy contracts through the bankruptcy process. The legacy soda ash business generated its power through burning coal. While the business today is operating on natural gas, this limits CO2 exposure, and with the soda ash exit, reduced the fixed cost footprint. Additionally, we believe we can reduce annual OpEx approximately $13.8 million per year by fully decoupling from the grid for a nominal CapEx of a half a million dollars. The third and final lever is volume, with the largest drivers coming from our plans to restart the SAC plant, ramp V-BOR, restart boric acid production in year two, and grow sodium bicarbonate output towards base plan capacity over the next three years. The restart of the SAC plant is a critical milestone we believe can provide two primary levers. The SAC plant is the facility where natural gas emissions are captured into the brine process, thus providing a free source of acidification with lower brine carbonation, expected to increase V-BOR output 20,000 tons on an annualized basis. This is the driver that is expected to yield 95,000 to 100,000 tons of V-BOR production in the current fiscal year relative to the 80,000 to 82,000 tons they are doing today. The full restart of SAC is targeted to be completed by the end of the quarter. With the restart of SAC, this will push additional heat to the lake, which is expected to increase brine grades, further driving output towards Westend's capacity, which stands at 135,000 tons of V-BOR. SAC restart can also produce a sodium bicarbonate by-product that can be sold, which we expect can generate incremental revenue. The SAC plant has the capacity to produce 700 tons per day of sodium bicarb with approximately 40,000 tons of demand available to sell in the regional and lower segments of the market on an annualized basis, with a greater opportunity to mature this market to 200,000 tons annual towards higher segments of the market. Taken together, our base plan targets approximately $40 million of steady state annual consolidated Adjusted EBITDA, and we expect to reach positive fiscal year consolidated Adjusted EBITDA in fiscal year 2028. However, adjusting for the acquisition-related and integration costs on an Adjusted EBITDA basis today, we expect to be very close to breakeven for our current fiscal year ending June 30th, 2027. We believe for nominal consideration, we acquired a significant asset base and a very close to cash flow positive business based on our contracting strategy that has positioned 5E to win. I want to be very clear on the $40 million Adjusted EBITDA number. It is our expectation under our base plan, not a ceiling on the earnings potential of these assets. It is built around the immediate operating levers we identified and can execute, repricing, the cost reset, the SAC restart, boric acid, and volume recovery. It does not include the longer-dated optionality from further boron expansion, lithium, or tungsten. We estimate that the borates expansion case already identified in our work could add approximately $38 million of annual Adjusted EBITDA on its own, nearly doubling the base case earnings before any contribution from tungsten or lithium. If the boron market develops as our market work suggests, we believe our potential earnings can scale further. Investors should view $40 million as the operating expected base case we believe we can build on, not as our view of the ultimate potential of Searles Valley. On financing, this transaction is already supported by 5E's balance sheet. That includes $15 million cash and a $10 million senior secured bridge facility from the prior owner, where $7 million has already been funded. Beyond the bridge facility, our go-forward financing plan includes working with our banking partners to set up a working capital debt facility. I have been actively in discussions with various critical mineral debt lenders where the take-or-pay offtake structure, fixed pricing, escalators, and liquidated damage provisions of the contracts have driven active discussions. That plan is sized against a peak pre-financing capital need of approximately $24 million in its first year post the acquisition. It is the company's intention to explore all financing options that minimize cost to capital and ensure a smooth execution of our plan. Now that we have presented our base plan for the go-forward business, I want to highlight the tremendous optionality SVM provides. As I mentioned, we have acquired a critical minerals platform, which includes four core minerals on the Critical Minerals List. The first includes borates, where we believe existing infrastructure provides 5E the ability to produce 135,000 tons of V-BOR and 45,000 tons of boric acid, as well as anhydrous borax. This represents materially more demand than what we originally contracted for, as this market is structurally very tight on supply. There are additional CapEx projects we can implement to expand V-BOR production, and we believe expanding V-BOR capacity, complemented by the scale of our resource position, gives 5E the opportunity to continue its position as a significant global boron producer and the only American-owned operator. Additionally, the brine includes potash, a critical mineral and fertilizer where infrastructure currently sits mothballed, which we believe can be restarted based on market conditions and demand. The third critical mineral is lithium, where SVM has an installed DLE pilot operation that has successfully produced lithium and we believe has real potential to become a California-based lithium provider. The final critical mineral, and what excites me the most about SVM, is that the brine includes approximately 40 to 50 ppms of the element W, also known as tungsten. In fact, over 35 years was devoted to R&D on the tungsten brine and is well documented in historical reports and literature. The R&D culminated in work performed in the 1980s by the US Bureau of Mines. While not compliant with S-K 1300 standards, Bureau of Mines report of investigations released in 1985 described Searles Lake as the largest known domestic tungsten resource and estimated approximately 135 million pounds of tungsten contained in the brines. Recovering it has been a target of industrial and federal research for many years, and the recovery process itself is not novel or unproven. It was independently piloted at meaningful scale by two separate organizations, including the United States Bureau of Mines, using compatible ion exchange chemistry with the Bureau of Mines campaign alone processing over 500,000 gallons of real Westend brine. The historical conclusion was that the process worked technically but was only marginally economic. The Bureau of Mines' 1984 evaluation found a 1% after-tax return at then prevailing tungsten prices. Reaching a 15% return would have required prices last seen around 1981. Current tungsten pricing today, elevated by China's 2025 export restrictions, is now running at multiples of that historical threshold on an inflation-adjusted basis. Using a mass balance and an economic model benchmarked against the historical pilot record and a deliberately conservative price range of $380-$675 per metric ton unit of WO3, we believe the standalone tungsten project is a meaningful opportunity and economic lever for growth. While this economic analysis is preliminary, we believe the upside is very real. During our diligence, we obtained multiple brine samples in the production process and independently validated the presence of tungsten. Further, tungsten production is viewed as a bolt-on operation and we believe would position 5E's operation to be a global low-cost producer of tungsten. You see, the SAC plant can provide a free source of acidification, and will eliminate any need to procure sulfuric acid. For the record, this is not included in our base plan we presented, and 5E expects this news can trigger outreach and non-dilutive funding opportunities, elevate the status of SVM as a near-term domestic solution, and provide an opportunity to diversify U.S. tungsten supply, which currently relies heavily on Chinese imports. What we believe makes the tungsten opportunity unusual is that this is not a conventional new mine development. We are already pumping, heating, and processing Searles Lake brine to recover borates at 5,000 gallons per minute, and historically, the depleted brine was returned to the lake with the tungsten still in it. The United States Bureau of Mines demonstrated at Westend that more than 90% of the tungsten could be extracted from the existing brine stream using ion exchange. As a result, there is essentially no separate mining operation required to access the tungsten feed. The brine is already being mined and moved for the core business. The incremental work is a recovery and purification circuit before the brine is returned. That is why our preliminary capital concept is measured in tens of millions of dollars rather than hundreds. While we work to achieve a V-BOR and boric acid turnaround, we intend to de-risk tungsten in parallel through current sampling, updated recovery and metallurgical work, engineering, product qualification, and an updated economic case, with the objective of moving into production as quickly as those work streams justify. Tungsten is on the 2025 U.S. Critical Minerals List, and the USGS identifies it among the highest risk critical mineral supply chains, with the Department of Defense already using DPA funding to support domestic tungsten projects that have historically been uneconomic but only stand economic today based largely on China's constraint on supply and grip on pricing. We believe that creates credible pathways to pursue non-dilutive government support as we work to advance the opportunity. If current work validates the historical recovery results, tungsten has the potential to become economically as important as or more important than the current V-BOR business. Importantly, none of that value is included in our $40 million base plan. Before I close today, I also want to spend a moment on our board. The turnaround expertise sitting at our table is a real asset in executing our plan, not a formality. Graham van't Hoff, our Chairman, ran Shell's $25 billion global chemicals business through seven years of record profitability. I'm incredibly grateful for 5E's board's mentorship and counsel as we negotiated this highly complex transaction. Finally, I want to thank the 5E team for their relentless support in assessing the SVM business opportunity and identifying the turnaround plan that supports a path to profitability. Let me close with Fort Cady because I don't want anyone to hear this news and conclude that we've walked away from it. We haven't. Fort Cady's large-scale S-K 1300-supported project and reserve has meaningfully advanced and stands at a de-risked position to turn on as market conditions determine. However, the immediate priority is SVM and the cash flow opportunity. These are not two separate stories. They are one integrated boron platform with a commercial organization selling into the same global customer base with near-term production at Searles Valley today and Fort Cady's long life, low cost capacity to follow. Overall, this transaction is the single largest step for this company and has taken it towards its mission. We have transformed from a developer with a great deposit and a plan to a producer with revenue, an experienced workforce, multiple operating plants and products, and a credible, identified, what we believe is a path to achieving annual steady state Adjusted EBITDA of approximately $40 million, with potential meaningful upside opportunities that are not in our base plan today. We believe this transaction and the discipline with which we structured it will deliver shareholder value. The way I would frame the acquisition is in two layers. First, an immediate operating reset with a clear path towards achieving the $40 million Adjusted EBITDA base case. Second, a multigenerational critical minerals platform with several independent ways that could potentially expand the earnings base. We acquired the infrastructure and resource position at a fraction of historically invested capital and stripped away much of the predecessor's legacy financial and contractual burden and did not pay for the tungsten, lithium or broader borate expansion optionality in our base case. That asymmetry is what makes this transaction so compelling for 5E. Our priority now is straightforward. Execute the base plan first, generate cash flow, and systematically advance the upside. That is the opportunity we see in front of 5E. With that, we are ready to open up the call for questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you have a question, please press star followed by the number one on your touchtone phone. You will hear a prompt acknowledging your request. If you would like to cancel your request, please press star two. Please ensure you lift the handset before pressing any keys. Our first question comes from the line of Tate Sullivan from Maxim Group. Please go ahead. Thank you, Paul. On slide 12, you showed the EBITDA timing of getting to the $40 million run rate potentially. Does most of this in year one and year two or all of it depend on just the Westend processing facility? Will Argus and Trona remain idled? Is that what you mentioned earlier? Hey, Tate. Thanks for the question. In year one, the focus is just Westend, and as our primary borax increases at the end of year one, we would look to restart Trona in year two. For year two, we are operating both Westend and Trona, and then in year three, we are maxing out boric acid production. The only caveat being within Argus does sit the SAC plant, and that should turn on here hopefully in the next three months. Okay, thank you. You said you have started re-contracting production or you already finished that process? I would say about two-thirds are contracted. We wanted to materially de-risk the revenue stream coming into this, but our commercial team is still out in the market. Okay, thank you. Just a brief, a little more history on the acquisition. You have on one of the slides, was it primarily the soda ash operations that were the loss generating or on the economic contracts that you mentioned? Sure. The business is actually a pretty unfortunate series of events where there was two acts of God back in 2018 and 2019. That was the Ridgecrest earthquake as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. Coming out of COVID, ultimately, the soda ash market experienced some pretty substantial weakness in price, which led to losses. Ultimately, it was the California Air Resources Board, where approximately $76 million of liabilities was accumulated on an annual basis. Just for simplicity, the company gets allowances and needs to surrender those allowances at the end of the year. Not all of the allowances need to be surrendered at each year. Basically, there was a bank account with CO2 credits in it, and those CO2 credits, any excess that was not due to surrender was sold in the open market. There was approximately $76 million due to the state of California, and bankruptcy took care of that. Thank you. One more from me is, in the release when you announced the acquisition mid-September, you mentioned near-term revenue. Right at close of the acquisition or you have closed, are you generating some revenue from the current operation? No. We picked up 10- one and first railcar shipments of V-BOR was out Friday. We're effectively making sales out of day one. Okay. Thank you, Paul. Thanks for having the call. Yep. As a reminder, if you have any questions or follow-up, please press star one. Our next question comes from the line of Dmitry Silversteyn from Water Tower Research. Please go ahead. Yes. Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my call. I just have, I guess, a question, Paul, more, I do not know, philosophical, I guess, is the wrong term. But you approached the boron market as a developer, and you were looking for high margin opportunities and looking to take advantage of the imbalance that is coming to the market between supply versus demand. Now that you have bought this business and you have done your due diligence work, you looked at the customers and the contracts that you have picked up and renegotiated or left behind, have you learned anything new about the boron market or the borates market that could help you guide where you think the value is right now, which markets are truly tight right now? Where the opportunities are for you to ramp up the borate production as you are looking to do it over the next couple of years. Is having producing assets changing your conversation with the potential customers that are looking at boric acid production a little bit further down the line? Dmitry, thanks for the question. I think one of the interesting things that was a key takeaway early on is that we've seen this with our commercial team. There's significant demand out of Asia. What's unique about Searles is that they have packaging capacity maybe 600,000 to 700,000 tons per year, but a lot of that was tied up in the soda ash business. From a segmentation perspective, they were selling in bulk rail car to the low end of the market. Our initial outreach over the summer was directly into Asia in bulk super sacks, and just through re-segmentation, we were able to see demand and pricing for the higher end of the markets much more robust than the legacy contracts. We had always talked about the segmentation. That was really interesting to see in real time how certain customers are, one, they really truly do need it, and two, a little less indifferent on the price because then they prioritize the security of supply over that. On the boric acid, yeah. Searles was producing boric acid. Obviously, they exited that earlier in the year. That has caused that market to be further supply-constrained, and we've been fielding calls consistently, though we don't have a solution to deliver right away. That's something we'll plan to turn on in year two. Got it. Then just to follow up on the sulfate of potash. The potash market is similar to the boron market in that there's really two or three global producers that seem to control most of the production. One of those global producers is in Canada, and Canada currently doesn't have particularly good relationships with the U.S. Taking all of that into account, is there thought in your business plan about going after the potash market maybe a little bit sooner because it could get into a deficit situation here in the U.S.? Potentially. I think that obviously the focus is definitely on the borates and ultimately leveraging the existing infrastructure that's there and utilizing what we ultimately have acquired today. That needs to be traded off, though, by one of the. The tungsten opportunity is super real, and it's probably the hottest critical mineral in the U.S. right now. Pricing is materially much higher than we were using in our base economics. I think, and there's an existing DLE. There's a pilot plant there on the lithium side. I think the focus was like, what's our core business? What can we contract at today? Does this make sense from a purchase price? Then you layer in the additional optionalities. We can assess that on a bottoms-up economic standalone basis and prioritize accordingly. Understood. All right. Thank you very much. Yep. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Mr. Paul Weibel. Please continue. Appreciate that. Appreciate everyone's time again and for joining us. This has been a significant week and a half for 5E, and I want to thank our entire team, 5E's board, all of our advisors, and the Searles Valley Minerals team for the work that went into getting us here today. We look forward to keeping you updated as we execute the operational reset at Searles Valley and continue advancing Fort Cady towards its next phase. Have a great day. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending for today's call, and you may now disconnect.