Energy Fuels Inc. (NYSE:UUUU) Q3 2022 Results Conference Call November 8, 2022 4:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Mark Chalmers - President and CEO

Conference Call Participants

Puneet Singh - Eight Capital

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Colin, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Energy Fuels Q3 2022 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

Mr. Mark Chalmers, you may begin your conference.

Mark Chalmers

Thank you for the introduction, and good afternoon to all of that are joining today and actually, it's morning for me in Adelaide, South Australia. Yes, we're -- thanks for joining the Q3 2022 conference call. We're always excited to talk about our achievements, particularly with our focus on uranium and rare earth.

I'm also pleased to say that we have a new format for our presentation today. We think it tells our story in a simpler, more compelling fashion. Even though our news flow during Q3 has been a little quiet, we're still continuing to make outstanding progress executing our business plan. Certainly, the overarching driver of the uranium markets continues to be the conflict with Russia and Ukraine. It is now clear that Russia must be eliminated from the Western nuclear fuel supply market. And that is putting pressure on uranium conversion and enrichment, and we think will flow to natural uranium markets.

The U.S. government continues to evaluate options in this regard, but most utilities are voluntarily moving away from Russian supply. As a result, and we've said this previously and reported, Energy Fuels has secured uranium supply contracts and we're looking at additional contracts at support of pricing. For these contracts, we have significant uranium inventories, which will be fed into the contracts in the early years. And we are working on investing in our minds and hiring people to resume large-scale uranium production as soon as next year.

On the rare earth front, I'm very pleased to say that we're installing a light separation commercial scale separation facility at the White Mesa Mill, and we believe if we do that the way we think we can do that, we'll be the first company in the U.S. commercially separating at scale. So very excited about that. The Bahia project, we expect to close at the end of this year or early next year. The main delay there is everything has been submitted to the Brazilian government, that is just the timeline they have to get those final transfers approved.