Thank you, Christiane.
The $1 million that was allocated, the seed money to do the rare earths element project, included a good portion for scientific R and D, and the project that you see in the slide deck was a result of the gaps analysis we have done in consultation with industry, provinces, and territories.
Based on that gap analysis, we were able to identify the five areas of research that you see. We have shown good success in the past year at the separation phase—which is the milling phase, the beneficiation stage—when, with the very small amount of money we have, we were able to develop a small pilot plant in our laboratories to obtain a high concentration of the mineral, improving its concentration up to 98%, with a recovery of some of the rare earths elements of up to 87%.
So within a short period of time we were able to produce a pilot plant at laboratory scale and improve the grade of the concentrate, from the seed money we got from the department.