One advantage that Canada has is that these international producers of battery metals have been in production for decades. I'm speaking mostly of lithium because that's my specialty.
They have 20- or 30-year offtake agreements with battery manufacturers out of Asia. They need to satisfy those offtake agreements by making sure that their supply chain is optimized and never has any downtime, of course.
The governments in Chile and Argentina are supporting lithium development and production. The Chilean government asked me to join their clean tech board for helping get lithium out of the country in a more sustainable way because they know that Canadians have a reputation for doing things the right way. We can fly that sustainability flag up our pole and people do look to us as an example of the right way to do things.
In Australia, Chile and Argentina, they know they need to improve on those archaic methods of extraction in order to comply with social demand and ESG regulations from government. They're looking for new technologies like ours to help them achieve those goals.
Canada is behind the eight ball because we haven't started producing yet. That urgency and that sense of needing to do that as fast as we can isn't as strong here. We're a little bit slower in the adoption of new technologies. However, the good thing about Canada is that we can develop processes from the ground up using new, sustainable processes, and advanced materials and technologies that are coming out of Dr. Plante's labs.