After three dismal years for the annual KRO Favorites Collection I decided to do something different for 2025. The concept during the past three years has been to feature companies that graduated from the Bottom-Fish Collection at the end of each year, and during the new year add companies from the Bottom-Fish Collection when their missing pieces fall into place and they have lifted off the bottom. Well by the end of 2024 only one bottom-fish clearly qualified to graduate to the 2025 Favorites Collection, and a number of 2024 Favorites collapsed back to Bottom-Fish status. It was also clear that the resource junior bear market that began in 2011 was only getting worse, and 2024 finished off with capitulation selling as investors threw in the towel. In my final Kaiser Watch Episode for 2024 I discussed that most of the reasons to expect the resource juniors to begin a secular bull market remain in place and have even become stronger in light of the uncertainty about the potential consequences of the incoming Trump administration's policies to Make America Great Again.

We will have to see if those policies do indeed spawn a raw material supply crisis as I predict, but what one cannot deny is that there is a huge disconnect between the price of gold and the market's attitude toward gold producers. Will this resolve itself as it did in 2013 when the price of gold collapsed back to $1,100, vindicating the downtrend gold producers developed in early 2011 while gold was still ramping toward $2,000, or will we see gold ramp through $3,000 and inject life into the gold producers and ultimately the gold juniors? Working against the latter is the perception that the American senior equity market led by the Magnificent Seven is invincible and will continue to rise in 2025, with Bitcoin also achieving new highs as Wall Streets rolls up its sleeves to loot America's pension plans. In 2025 we will be walking through the looking glass into an alternative reality where many surprises may assault the world. In my view these surprises will be beneficial for gold and light a fire under the gold producers, as well as the idea that the Global West must launch a massive exploration campaign in secure jurisdictions to develop reliable raw material supply. I believe during 2025 the unloved junior resource sector will come alive and start to experience massive inflow of risk capital, accelerating as we head into 2026. I believe 2025 will be a turnaround year for the endless secular resource junior bear market.

I have populated the KRO 2025 Favorites Collection with 20 diverse resource juniors, and my Bottom-Fish Collection has over 100 members that can feed the Favorites Collection as their missing pieces fall into place. The Favorites which in the past included only Fair and Good Speculative value rated juniors now include Bottom-Fish rated juniors. It is my goal to turn the Favorites into an education platform that teaches new audiences how to think about resource juniors. Kaiser Research Online at $450 per calendar year will become an exclusive club after March 31, 2025 when the new rate jumps to $200 per month or $2,000 for 12 months aimed at high net worth or corporate entities. The education platform will be presented through Kaiser Watch Substack where Kaiser Watch General comments will be available free while the Kaiser Watch Specific comments about resource junior Favorites will be available through a $10 monthly membership fee.

I launched Kaiser Research three decades ago in late 1994 and at the end of 1995 I published the 1996 Bottom-Fish List through the hardcopy Kaiser Bottom-Fishing Report featuring 100 bottom-fish. The 1996 Bottom-Fish Collection was the best performing one ever. I think the 2025 Bottom-Fish Collection is vastly superior, but the audience that existed three decades ago has largely vanished. My goal is to help the resource junior sector rebuild that lost audience by targeting younger generations who may tire of mindlessly chasing momentum trends. The cheaper Kaiser Watch Substack venue will hopeful serve as the gateway for accomplishing this goal.

This Episode discusses the first nine juniors in my 2025 Favorites Collection while next week's will talk about the remaining Favorites.

Alcara Resources Inc is a 2025 Favorite because it is best positioned to fast track deliver a meaningful supply of non-Chinese rare earths that includes the magnet heavy rare earths dysprosium and terbium. In 2009 after the financial crisis I correctly predicted Rare Earth Mania which played out in 2009-2011 when China decided to curtail rare earth exports to the rest of the world, sending rare earth prices to the moon. Picks like Avalon, Rare Element, Quest and Tasman did extremely well, especially when Wall Street floated Molycorp to revive the mothballed Mountain Pass Mine in California. China eventually eased restrictions and rare earth prices collapsed. But in the decade since then global production has tripled thanks to demand for the magnet rare earths which are a small portion of a typical rare earth deposit. There has not been a corresponding demand boost for the more abundant rare earths such as cerium and lanthanum which has clobbered the prices of most non-magnet rare earths. This means that typically 80%-90% of a rare earth deposit's rock value resides in the magnet rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium. Officially China supplies only 68% of global rare earth production but the number is actually 80% because the 12% mined in the United States has to be shipped to China for cracking. This is a ticking time bomb for the Global West.

Aclara Resources Inc, which is backed by a member of the Hochschild family after being spun out from the mining company, is advancing the Carina deposit in Brazil. Carina is an ion adsorption clay deposit similar to those mined in China for the heavy rare earths, except that the Brazilian versions have not undergone the extra weathering that depleted the cerium in the Chinese ionic clay deposits. Carina, although lower grade than other ionic clay Brazilian deposits such as Verde Agritech's Man of War deposit, stands out because 28% of its rare earth distribution is represented by the heavy rare earths which are very low in carbonatite style deposits. Aclara has a Bottom-Fish Spec Value rating because at current spot prices development of Carina is not going to make much money. But if the geopolitical conflict between China and the United States escalates, and China once again curtails rare earth supply, the price of rare earths outside of China will go through the roof, not as crazily as it did in Rare Earth Mania 1.0, but still enough to make Aclara's Carina deposit very lucrative. So the missing piece is China expanding its critical mineral export restrictions to include rare earths. The flow-sheets for ionic clay deposits are simpler than for hardrock deposits, mining is basically strip mining the weathered clay horizon similar to laterite deposits, and Brazil is a good jurisdiction to rapidly develop a mine. What is a bonus with Aclara is that the company has formed an alliance with a Chilean conglomerate to develop magnet making capacity outside of China, a major missing piece in the United States. If China imposes rare earth export restrictions in retaliation for Trump tariffs or as a consequence of annexing Taiwan, and "export" rare earth prices soar, Aclara will be the go to proxy for the market.

Arizona Gold and Silver Inc is a 2025 Favorite because it is a gold discovery exploration junior which in 2025 is finally in a position to test a dual outcome target at its Philadelphia project in southwestern Arizona. Since acquiring Philadelphia in late 2019 the junior has been drilling off the high grade Philadelphia vein covered by the unpatented claims. This story which looked like trying to find deeper high grade vein material left behind by the old-timers lacked scale until 2022 when the junior observed decent grade disseminated gold mineralization in the hanging wall of the vein. This became the Red Hill hypothesis which speculates that the untested rhyolite flow dome of this low sulphidation epithermal system. The Red Hill target has a footprint capable of hosting a 2-5 million ounce open-pittable gold deposit at the grade observed in the hanging, in addition to the 500,000+ ounce high grade underground mineable potential of the vein itself. However, Red Hill is to the east of the Philadelphia vein and sits on BLM land. The permitting process took almost two years, resulting in approval for 2 drill pads in June 2024. While no permits were required to drill from the patented claims, the eastward dip of the Philadelphia vein limited how deep Arizona Gold could chase the vein. The two drill pads were chosen to fan holes that can chase the high grade vein down dip and test the bulk tonnage Red Hill hypothesis in the hanging wall. The triple curse that hangs over Canadian resource juniors is that permitting, funding and seasonal cycles are not synchronized.

Arizona Gold's plan to start drilling in July 2024 was stymied by extremely hot weather in southern Arizona during which it would be difficult to keep drilling crew safe from heat exhaustion. Drilling did not start until October and two rigs have drilled 6 holes. These holes have intersected the vein where expected and when the assays arrive in January we will probably see decent high grade values. But what everybody is holding their breath about is confirmation that the Red Hill hypothesis is correct. Thick low grade intervals of 1-2 g/t gold in the hanging wall will be what sends the stock soaring, not the short high grade intervals. But even if all we get is vein mineralization, there is an exit strategy now in the wings. The nearby Moss Mine of bankrupt Elevation Gold Mining Corp was just acquired by producer Mako Mining Corp which will need a high grade ore feed to make the mine profitable. There does, however, remain bluesky in the eastern part of the Philadelphia project where Aster data indicates a much bigger alteration anomaly than the Red Hill target. Arizona Gold has confirmed this Philadelphia East target by securing higher resolution Aster data. The footprint of the Aster anomaly has a scale comparable to that of AngloGold's Silicon-Merlin deposit in southwestern Nevada where 13 million open pittable ounces have been outlined. Once Arizona Gold has ground truthed the targets it will have to apply to the BLM for drill permit to test Philadelphia East.

Canalaska Uranium Ltd is a 2025 Favorite because in 2025 it will be in a position to confirm that its high grade uranium Pike Zone discovery at West McArthur has the scale of the world class McArthur Zone 2 deposit and perhaps intersect similar "string of pearls" zones within the C10 South Corridor. Canalaska was added to the 2024 Favorites in March last year after the junior intersected the Pike zone at its West McArthur project in Saskatchewan's Athabasca Basin. The Pike Zone is a high grade unconformity associated style of mineralization similar to what makes McArthur River a world class orebody. Two drill hole lines indicate a footprint similar to McArthur Zone 2 which hosts 350 million lbs at 16% U3O8. In 2023 drilling had only intersected high grade mineralization in the basement, so the Pike Zone was a major development. It is somewhat deeper than McArthur River and requires careful directional drilling. But it is in the same geological setting and there exists the potential to delineate multiple Pike zones like a string of pearls, similar to the case of McArthur River. The challenge during 2024 was to drill small stepouts to figure out the geometry of the zone so that it could be systematically delineated. This took longer than expected, but the potential to become a $20-$30 stock on confirmation that Pike is indeed a McArthur River scale system has attracted substantial financing and Canalaska starts 2025 with $20 million in working capital. Uranium prices have sagged back to the $75/lb level from over $100/lb in 2023, so while the uranium boom is no longer celebrating the price trend, but a revival of interest in carbon free power for AI data centers is currently driving interest, coupled with concern that Kazakhstan's production capacity has plateaued. Canalaska's West McArthur is a world class discovery story and the long term outlook for uranium prices is $80 per lb and higher.

Colonial Coal International Corp is a 2025 Favorite because it continues to be a buyout target for east Asian steelmakers seeking a secure supply of metallurgical coal also known as coking coal. Colonial Coal was the 2024 Favorite star performer until August thanks to a decision by CitiBank take on the role of seeking a buyer for the company. The junior owns two major coal deposits in northeastern British Columbia where all the existing land is now owned by major producers. Colonial Coal completed a PEA in 2018 for the Flatbed deposit as an underground mine and in 2020 for Huguenot as a combination open pit and underground mine. Coking coal prices soared above $600 per tonne in early 2022 but have since retreated to the USD $200/tonne level which is above the $174/t base case price used for Huguenot and $160.50/t used for Flatbed which generated NPVs of USD $1,027,000,000 and $691 million respectively at a 7.5% discount rate. Since then there has been 20%-30% cost inflation which is partly offset by the higher coking coal price. The combined value is about USD $1.7 billion or about CAD $2.4 billion at 1.44:1 exchange rate which would translate into an NPV per share value of CAD $12.55 for Colonial Coal. The hoped for outcome is a bid in the $5-$10 range, possibly higher if a competitive auction broke out. Indian steelmakers who lost out a decade ago when they were early bidders for coal assets are expected to be major bidders this time around, especially given India's ambition to drive the next China style super cycle. The situation got a bit confusing in 2024 when BHP took a failed run at Anglo American which to protect itself decided to sell its coal assets in Australia and British Columbia. In addition the market waited to see if Ottawa would approve Teck's sale of its coal assets to Glencore whose plan to develop Sukunka was shot down a couple years ago on caribou impact concerns. The Teck sale has been approved and there have been changes involving Conuma Coal's holdings in the Peace River area. Colonial Coal's price slumped during Q4 of 2024 as the market backed off amid uncertainty about the outcome of the US election. That outcome is now known and the world is braced for a trade war. One global response could be for nations to retaliate against the United States with their own tariffs but start trading among each other without such tariffs. This scenario could inject new urgency into Asian steelmakers to acquire the last two major coking coal deposits left in the Peace River region not controlled by a producer. Coal mined in this region would be railed to Prince Rupert for shipping across the Pacific. While the underlying fundamental story has not changed the geopolitical context is now in flux, so I am keeping Colonial Coal as a 2025 Favorite.

Eagle Plains Resources Ltd is one of two prospect-generator-farmout juniors added to the 2025 Favorites Collection as bets that the secular bear market will come to an end and spur other juniors to option properties from Eagle Plains. The junior has been around for decades without a rollback and has done several spinouts. Headed by Tim Termuende and Chuck Downie Eagle Plains is a successful survivor at this game which specializes in western Canada and has a healthy treasury of about $8 million. It is cheap and Bottom-Fish Spec Value rated because during the current bear market there is limited appetite from other juniors to farm into the projects Eagle Plains generates by studying historical assessment work and being very efficient at map staking claims when they come open. And even when these juniors do option a project they have a hard time raising capital to conduct meaningful exploration. Eagle Plains is not dogmatic about the farmout model and will spend its own money on projects where its geologists believe targets represent low hanging fruit. For example the junior in 2023 spent over $1 million drilling Sullivan 2 targets at its Vulcan project and concluded that the target was elsewhere on the property. The outcome of the planned followup program remains in limbo because the junior is still waiting for new drill permits. Thanks to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's decision to make Canada embrace UNDRIP and elevate First Nations to the status of an aristocracy with a final say on the future of exploration and development of Canada's natural resources, western Canada is plagued by a permitting regime which requires First Nations consultation which First Nations aren't always in a hurry to engage in. The Iron Range farmout has also been trapped in a First Nations caused limbo. Perhaps with Trudeau's departure and an incoming US president who may not be joking about annexing Canada as the 51st state the First Nations may shift into a more collaborative mode. The missing pieces that trap Eagle Plains with a Bottom-Fish spec value rating are the need for a resource junior bull market to emerge which enables Eagle Plains to do more farmouts that get funded, and that the attitude of First Nations shifts from obstruction to productive collaboration. The first will depend on the degree that the conflict between Global West and East intensifies and highlights the need to develop mines in secure jurisdictions. The latter could happen on a broader scale if a mandate emerges from Ottawa that UNDRIP is not a tool to make Canada a hostile acquisition target for the United States, or at a local scale where the bands in the vicinity of a project that requires exploration work decide it is in their interest to collaborate. In terms of a flagship that Eagle Plains might drill with its own dime, that currently is the George Lake project in Saskatchewan which hosts a modest SEDEX style zinc deposit that deserves a rethink.

Endurance Gold Corp, despite still being rated as Bottom-Fish Spec Value, was made a 2025 Favorite because the Reliance drilling results in 2024, unacknowledged by the market, have pushed this epizonal orogenic high grade gold project in southwestern British Columbia to a tipping point where drilling in 2025, backed by $4 million in working capital, will finally force the market to recognize Reliance as a major gold discovery. Endurance optioned the Reliance project in late 2019 and during the subsequent 5 years has drilled 84 RC and 108 diamond drill holes within a 1,500 m segment of the Royal-Treasure shear corridor. Meaningful gold mineralization has been intersected in 75% of the holes, but the market has not responded because a mineable geometry is not self evident. The junior is in a position to produce an open-pittable resource estimate for the near surface mineralization, but is reluctant to do so because the gold content may not exceed the 1 million ounce threshold the market insists on. That is understandable but what the market fails to understand is that this is an orogenic system whose gold mineralization can persist over several thousand vertical metres and in this system the geochemistry indicates the surface is near the top. What the market wants to see is a deeper vein system emerge that is comparable to the 4 million ounce high grade resource that was discovered and mined at the Bralorne deposit a century ago. That means drilling ever deeper, something CEO Robert Boyd has been reluctant to do with big stepouts because it is in his conservative nature to build a system incrementally.

2023 was supposed to be the breakout year but the drilling season was curtailed by major forest fires in the district which proved to be a problem that year across much of Canada. In 2024 the major shareholder Richard Gilliam stepped up with a $4 million financing at a premium to the market which allowed Endurance to execute a major drill program which filled the "Crown" gap between the Imperial and Eagle Zones and doubled the depth at which high grade mineralization has been intersected. As a bonus hole #106, the last one reported in 2024, revealed that there is a second mineralized zone in the footwall of the Imperial Zone which past holes stopped short of testing. The market, which in the 12th year of an endless resource junior bear market only responds to barnburner drill intersections, has ignored the 2024 story building accomplishments which justify much more aggressive drilling in 2025.

During the past couple years Endurance has done several 100% farm-in deals on land to the north and done target development work in an area that has never been drilled because the bedrock is obscured by ashfall from a recent Meager Creek volcanic eruption and the mountainsides are thick with unlogged forest. In late 2024 Endurance violated "just-in-time" textbook dogma by accelerating all cash and stock payments to vest 100% in the entire land package. There appear to be a half dozen structural trends parallel to the Royal-Treasure Shear corridor on the original Reliance claim, some of which have soil geochemistry anomalous with gold and the arsenic-antimony pathfinder elements. The vendors are all truly arms length, so this decision to lock up 100% now, and pre-empt future litigation when something clearly worth fighting for is visible, is a sign that management believes 2025 will be a breakout year for the Reliance project.

What is missing, which explains the Bottom-Fish Spec Value rating, is market acknowledgement that Reliance is an unfolding multi-million ounce high grade gold discovery. Beyond the Reliance play Endurance also owns the Elephant Mountain project in Alaska which is an intrusion related gold system similar to Fort Knox but which has been explored in the manner of blind men grasping at parts of an elephant. The Tintina Gold Belt and its Tombstone rocks have garnered fresh market interest thanks to Snowline's Valley discovery in southeastern Yukon where previous operators grasped at the Rogue project without definitive success. At the moment the market seems to think that $2,600 gold is a mirage that soon enough will fade back to a reality below $2,000. But the gold market does not yet reflect the potential mayhem Trump may unleash if he puts his words into action. Elephant Mountain is not worth touching without a minimum $5 million exploration budget, but its potential for bulk tonnage gold mineralization in contrast to the high grade largely underground mineable potential of Reliance turns Endurance Gold into a side bet on gold blasting through $3,000 and igniting a gold based bull market for resource juniors.

Faraday Copper Corp made it back onto the Favorites Collection in 2025 because its Copper Creek deposit in Arizona is an advanced copper play that would benefit from a rising copper price. Faraday is well financed with $25 million working capital and is backed by heavyweights such as Murray Edwards, Pierre Lassonde and the Lundin family. The company has Bottom-Fish Spec Value rating because the PEA it published for Copper Creek in 2023 delivered numbers that do not robustly clear development hurdles at the $3.80/lb copper base case rice. Although copper surged toward $5/lb in early 2024 it had pulled back to the $4/lb level by the start of 2025. The PEA envisioned a 30,000 tpd mill initially processing open-pit mined ore until year seven when the operations starts to transition to fully underground mining by year twelve. Using a 7% discount rate the PEA indicated an after-tax NPV of USD $713 million with an IRR of 15.6% for a 32 year mine life that would produce 3.4 billion lbs of copper. The problem with these economic numbers is that CapEx came in at $798 million, 12% more than the NPV, and while the 15.6% IRR at least clears the 15% hurdle, there is not much room for error at $3.80/lb copper. Faraday Copper Corp was made a 2025 Favorite as a leveraged bet the future price of copper will be $4.50 or higher.

Most future supply-demand projections present a supply deficit emerging by 2030 which will be worse if the energy transition goals are not scuttled by the Trump administration. The IEA has predicted that copper consumption related to net zero emission goals for 2050 would require a 50% supply boost above macroeconomic demand from clean energy technologies by 2030 if the 2030 energy transition targets are to be met. But just because Trump and his devotees dismiss any linkage been global warming and greenhouse gas emissions, what they cannot ignore is that climate change in the form of rising temperature will cause electricity demand for air conditioning to soar. In addition during the past couple years the AI Dream has come to dominate the technology world and most predictions are that the AI data centers will boost electricity demand. While fossil fuel cars may continue to dominate car sales in the United States, China's EV sales are already more than 50% of total sales, and while cheap Chinese EVs with short ranges may not be good enough for Global West consumers, they are good enough for Global South consumers. Electric vehicle related copper demand growth will remain a factor along with demand growth from AI and AC needs. Faraday Copper Corp is thus a bet that higher real copper prices are coming and will boost the economics of the Copper Creek mining plan.

Faraday is pushing through with the permitting cycle which in the United States is a painfully slow process and continuing exploration for new zones that could scale the story bigger while we wait for the copper price to improve. Although copper is classified as a "critical mineral" because it is critical for energy transition goals, the global supply of copper is well diversified among Global West, East and South nations so it does not have criticality in terms of security of supply. North America is responsible for nearly 12% of global supply, but the GDP of the United States, Canada and Mexico is 30% of 2023 GDP. The implication is that the United States does require globalized trade to remain a reality so that it can continue to secure its needs at the market price for copper.

This assumption of globalized trade could be jeopardized by how Trump deploys tariffs, as well as the conflict between Global West and East escalating. The latter may not be a problem if the Global South stays allied with the Global West, but that may not be the outcome of thuggish isolationist policies. Should the United States suddenly find itself cut off from its full copper supply need because of a geopolitical realignment of alliances, exploration for and development of domestic copper supply could become a paramount priority for the United States. Faraday thus offers upside from three story lines: 1) discovering something bigger and better at Copper Creek, 2) witnessing higher global copper prices due to demand growth from sectors like AI, AC and EVs, and, 3) domestic price shocks arising from curtailment of global copper supply.

FPX Nickel Corp is a 2025 Favorite because it is a contrarian bet that President Trump's hostility toward the concept of climate change and energy transition goals will prove to be mere flatulence dispersed by the march of reality. FPX has a Bottom-Fish Spec Value rating because at the moment nothing is working in its favor. Its flagship project in central British Columbia which it has advanced through the PFS stage since recognizing the unusual nature of the nickel mineralization at Decar, is worthless at the current nickel spot price of $6.86/lb. The 2023 PFS used $8.75/lb as a base case price which gives the project an after-tax NPV per share value ranging from $2.52 at a 10% discount rate to $10.28 at 5%. The price of nickel, however, has been clobbered by the emergence of Indonesia has a supplier of more than 50% of global nickel production. How did this happen? During the China super-cycle Chinese stainless steel producers dealt with a soaring nickel price by developing a process that allowed them to feed something called "nickel pig iron" into their stainless steel mills. NPI was created by strip mining mineralized laterite ore in Indonesia and the Philippines, shipping it as whole rock ore to China, and feeding it into legacy blast furnaces to make nickel pig iron which was good enough to meet Chinese standards for stainless steel. During the past decade Indonesia imposed a moratorium on this process which forced the Chinese to finance smelting capacity in Indonesia which worked because Indonesia has lax environmental standards and abundant coal powered electricity. So Indonesian nickel is a cheap supply of dirty nickel that is flooding the market and forcing nickel sulphide based mines operated in the Global West to shut down. Canada's WokeOlympics gold medalist prime minister was so pleased by the idea of dumping costs outside of Canada to preserve Canada as sacred territory for its First Nations that he recently struck a free trade deal with Indonesia that will flood Canada with cheap dirty nickel.

None of this is good for FPX Nickel because what makes Decar stand out is that its 30 plus year mining plan has a very low carbon footprint that may even achieve zero carbon neutrality. The key is a mineral called awaruite, a nickel-iron alloy that is effectively natural stainless steel. It occurs in ultramafic ophiolite complexes that have undergone metamorphism that squeezed the nickel out of its otherwise inert silicate lattice prison and enabled it to combine with iron. The awaruite grains are magnetic and have a very high specific gravity which allows it to be extracted through grinding and magnetic separation. The concentrate can then be upgraded to a 75% ferro-nickel concentrate through flotation that, similar to nickel pig iron, can be fed directly into stainless steel mills. In addition to the resulting low per unit energy cost, the tailings are not only benign thanks to the absence of sulphide, but the nature of the magnesium gangue mineral, brucite, that occurs in this type of deposit, makes it very good at sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide into an inert carbonate mineral.

The low carbon nature of Decar's potential nickel output attracted the Finnish stainless steelmaker Outokumpu as a 9.9% strategic investor with market price based offtake rights, joining an earlier secret strategic investor that owns just under 10%. The identity of that secret investor who secured no offtake rights used to tantalize the market, but today the market simply wonders who was stupid enough to think that ESG principles would prevail over the long run? My own suspicion is that the strategic investor is the carmaker Toyota which skipped the EV race because it knew the prevailing lithium ion battery was not good enough to support mass adoption except in China where "good enough" has a much lower threshold, but which was also internally working on a cost effective solid state lithium ion battery that would be good enough to support mass adoption. Given that commercialization is still a couple years down the road it would make sense that a strategic investor like Toyota would seek to remain secret. FPX has invested money developing the flowsheet for a refinery that converts the ferro-nickel concentrate into battery grade nickel sulphate, which apparently the current configuration of Toyota's solid state LiB still requires for the cathode. This refinery subtracts from the NPV and IRR of the Decar PFS, so is something for a downstream party which needs nickel sulphate to bankroll and which it can claim as "clean".

Further support for this speculation emerged when Sumitomo Metal, a real mining company focused on profits from mining, not downstream marketing advantages, also became a strategic investor just under 10%, but with the right to grow its position to 15% through open market purchases, something that has yet to happen. In addition, FPX has formed an alliance with JOGMEC, the Japanese government agency tasked with securing metal supply for Japanese conglomerates. The purpose of this alliance is to seek out other potential awaruite dominated nickel deposits in British Columbia and the rest of the world. Outokumpu and likely the secret strategic investor have a business model of selling "clean energy" products, but when Trump assumes power on January 20, 2025 they will be fighting the mantra "clean is had, dirty is good". FPX Nickel is thus a bet that the apocalyptic mind-set that personifies the MAGA movement will be short-lived, and also that the conflict between Global West and East does get hot and disrupts the flow of dirty Indonesian nickel to the Global West.

Betting that the world will reject cheap dirty nickel from Indonesia is something of a hard sell in the current political climate, but FPX does have a 75% stake in CO2 Lock which it launched in 2022 to hold those projects FPX had unsuccessfully investigated as having awaruite potential but which had an abundance of the brucite magnesium mineral which is so effective at converting carbon dioxide into a carbonate mineral. Given the vocal celebration of fossil fuel combustion by the incoming Trump administration it may seem foolish to care about carbon capture.

Interest in carbon capture may come from the fossil fuel sector itself. The current problem is that clean energy activists have been absolutists who want fossil fuels dumped yesterday and have no understanding what "energy transition" means. The fossil fuel producers do understand that there is a transition underway, and they need look no further than China to appreciate why electric vehicles are the future of transportation. While oil refined into diesel or gasoline may be a sunset industry, this is not so obvious for natural gas as a source of electricity. Until fusion energy becomes a commercial reality, natural gas and nuclear energy serving as baseload supply alongside renewables are the energy future. While nuclear energy is largely carbon free, natural gas is not. But its emissions from power generation, unlike the tailpipe emissions of ICE cars, occur in a single place, so carbon capture is a plausible strategy for limiting greenhouse gas emissions, something Big Oil will be eager to pursue. At some point FPX Nickel will spin out its 75% stake in CO2 Lock, which, if it has been successful in securing multiple "brucite" deposits suitable for carbon sequestration, could end up being worth far more than the nickel production capacity. FPX Nickel and its Decar project are stuck in the value trough of the Lassonde Curve defined by feasibility studies and permitting, at a time when the nickel price is below what it needs to be for Decar to be developed. But beyond a bet that demand for clean nickel priced at a premium to dirty nickel will emerge, FPX Nickel is also a proxy bet that energy transition goals will not be flushed down the toilet.

Nevada Organic Phosphate Inc, although Bottom-Fish Spec Value rated thanks to its weak treasury and cheap price helped out by the plodding BLM permitting cycle and obsession with sage grouse habitat, was made a 2025 Favorite because of its fascinating story, namely demonstrating the existence of a large, scalable supply of organic phosphate. The junior has spent $1 million funding studies required by the BLM to approve a phosphate lease application for its Murdock Mountain project in northeastern Nevada. Unlike metal claims where one stakes first and then applies to the BLM for drill permits, phosphate is treated like coal, oil and potash. One submits a lease application to the BLM which requires the applicant to fund a variety of environmental studies before accepting the application, which then gives the applicant two years to demonstrate that a resource exists that justifies granting title through a lease. The Murdock Mtn application covers the southern end of the Leach Mountain range where outcropping phosphate beds have been known about since the 1960s. They are at the southwestern periphery the Western Phosphate Field which straddles six states and was once an inland sea. These phosphate beds grade 3%-15% P2O5, are only 2-4 metres thick, and have never been mined because they cannot compete with the much thicker phosphate beds in Idaho that grade 25%-35% P2O5.

Back in the 1960s there was not much interest in organic food, but today there is intense interest, especially in California which has nearly 40 million people and whose GDP would rank fifth among nations. The problem with the Idaho phosphate beds is that they have a heavy metal content well above the maximum limit of the Heavy Metal Index the USFDA insists all agricultural inputs must be below. These heavy metals include nasties such as uranium and thorium. The big fertilizer companies reduce the heavy metal content below the HMI limit by chemically processing the high grade phosphate to produce the MAP and DAP products. But once that is done the phosphate no longer qualifies as organic, which does not matter because it is destined for the soybean, corn and grain crops of America's breadbasket about whose organic status few care. California's agricultural crops, however, are fruit, nuts and vegetables about whose organic status it is much easier to care.

The problem for organic farmers is that manure and bone-meal are the primary sources of organic phosphate whose supply cannot be scaled and which has transportation issues. The Murdock Mountain phosphate beds are unusual in that the outcrop has a heavy metal content that is 10% of the HMI maximum. It would thus be possible to mine the beds, grind up the phosphate ore, blend it to create a consistent P2O5 grade, and ship it to organic farmers as a whole rock product that can be applied directly to their fields. The grinding and bagging facility would be at Montello which is just to the east of the Leach Mountain Range and is a stop for the Union Pacific Railway which travels south through Las Vegas to end up in the Los Angeles area and counterclockwise via northern Nevada through Reno to end up in the San Francisco area. The railway would allow cheap delivery of organic phosphate to the northern and southern ends of the Central Valley.

NOP finally got a green light from the BLM in mid September 2024 but final approval had to move up through six levels of a bureaucracy whose culture seems to be the deny and delay one of the health insurance sector. When final approval and request for a reclamation bond arrived in late October, it coincided with the start of a six month restricted activity period to protect nesting sage grouse. The Murdock Mtn play was started a decade ago and stalled when the entire area became part of a sage grouse study area, and then further delayed by the covid pandemic. Ironically there is little evidence of sage grouse in the Leach Mountain Range but in a range farther to the west there are so many sage grouse hunting is allowed. As one of its last demonstrations of NIMBY exceptionalism the Department of Interior declared over 30 million acres in western United States as sage grouse habitat (only 250,000 are believed to remain from a former population in the millions) in an apparent effort to sterilize this region for future mining.

Nevada Organic Phosphate must overcome the following challenges. First it must raise over $1 million to fund a drilling program and the subsequent organic certification process. The second is to demonstrate that the beds are reasonably consistent and continuous to support low cost underground mining in the manner that coal seams are mined. The target that is the focus of the BLM drilling permit has a footprint of about 40 million tonnes. The third is to demonstrate that the P2O5 grade is within the expected range. The fourth is perhaps the most important milestone, namely demonstrating that the low heavy metal content in the weathered outcrop is similarly low in the down-dip fresh rock. This milestone is critical because if the Murdock Mountain phosphate beds do not qualify as "organic" they are worthless. On the plus side, because of the large scale precipitation nature of these beds in a marine setting the geochemical makeup is likely to be similar laterally over a large area. NOP has already identified multiple other locations within the Leach Mountain Range where phosphate beds appear to be present and has filed lease applications to cover what amounts to a footprint in the 100-200 million tonne range. It will not start doing the BLM studies until it has confirmed that the Murdock Mtn phosphate is certifiable as organic, but it has set itself up to have an effective monopoly on this potential source of organic phosphate. The goal of the company is to deliver proof of concept, secure the Murdock Mtn lease, and initiate the approval process for the other lease applications. If NOP is successful it will attract the buyout attention of one of the big fertilizer companies which can see a scalable supply of organic phosphate for California's agricultural sector serving the biggest market for organic food in the world.