Standard Lithium Ltd. (AMEX:SLI) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Standard Lithium Ltd. (AMEX:SLI) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript May 11, 2026

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to Standard Lithium Ltd.’s First Quarter 2026 Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a brief question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. It is now my pleasure to turn today’s call over to Daniel Rosen, VP of Investor Relations and Strategy for Standard Lithium Ltd. Please go ahead.

Daniel Rosen: Thank you, and welcome, everyone. I am joined today by David Park, our CEO and director; J. Andrew Robinson, president, COO, and director; Salah I. Gamoudi, chief financial officer; and Mike Barman, chief development officer. Before we begin, I would like to start with a reminder that some of the statements made during our call today, including any related to company performance, expectations, and timing of projects, may constitute forward-looking statements. Please note the cautionary language about forward-looking statements contained in our press release, which also applies to this call. I will now turn the call over to David.

David Park: Thanks, Daniel, and I appreciate everyone joining us today. We have had an active first quarter and year to date as we continue to advance important milestones and deliverables of the company. We achieved major operational milestones at our plant in Arkansas, including the processing of over 1 million barrels of live Smackover brine going back over the last six years. Our large-scale demo plant is the first of its kind and is critical to everything we have been able to accomplish at Standard Lithium Ltd. It has provided a robust dataset to support the scalability and de-risking of our selected process technology and flow sheet. It has also strengthened our first-mover advantage within the Smackover, where we have the only shovel-ready project that is preparing to take a final investment decision: our Southwest Arkansas project.

We have also been working diligently to advance the remaining workstreams required prior to a final investment decision, and we have made meaningful progress on all fronts. In the first quarter, we announced our first binding commercial offtake agreement with Trafigura, a global commodities leader with an established presence across battery metals, including lithium. Smackover Lithium will supply Trafigura with 8,000 metric tons per year of battery-quality lithium carbonate over a 10-year period, beginning at the start of commercial production. We will address the status of each of the remaining workstreams and how it supports our overall plan, which remains to take FID at the Southwest Arkansas project and begin construction in 2026. With that, I will pass it over to Andy.

Thanks.

J. Andrew Robinson: We are pleased to announce the achievement of several meaningful operational milestones at our demo plant in El Dorado, Arkansas, which operates a full brine-to–lithium carbonate flow sheet. We have now processed over 1 million barrels of real brine pumped in real time from the Smackover formation, have completed over 15,000 direct lithium extraction, or DLE, cycles, and met the fundamental performance targets for the core process technology that is going to be used by the SWA project. This includes 95%+ lithium recovery and 99%+ rejection of key contaminants, consistent with the performance guarantees in place under our licensing agreement with Aquatec. It was done with roughly 340,000 man-hours over six years of operating with zero incidents, underscoring Standard Lithium Ltd.’s strong commitment to operational safety and best practices.

The demo plant will continue to serve as a critical platform for process flow sheet optimization, operational data collection, engineering design input, and training of our core team of 38 engineers and operators to prepare them for the commissioning and operation of our first commercial facility, the SWA project. At the beginning of the year, we laid out four primary deliverables to be completed prior to taking FID, namely: contract execution with the key construction vendors; receiving the needed approvals from federal regulators; finalizing customer offtake agreements; and closing the project financing. For the vendor contracts, we are pursuing an engineering, procurement, commissioning, and construction, or EPCC, model for the downstream portion of the project, which contains the central processing facility and includes the direct lithium extraction and battery-quality lithium carbonate conversion process, and pursuing an engineering, procurement, and construction management, or EPCM, model for the upstream well field and pipeline portion of the project.

We are currently finalizing agreements with our selected partners in these two key roles and expect both to be completed in the second quarter. As previously indicated, each contract contains a limited notice to proceed provision in order to immediately progress key work items and to optimize the construction schedule prior to taking a final investment decision. A full notice to proceed would immediately follow a positive FID. On the regulatory front, the project is required to go through an environmental assessment under NEPA, triggered by a $225 million grant from the Department of Energy. The DOE is leading this process, which is nearing its formal conclusion after more than a year of review and engagement, and is expected to be completed in the second quarter, as per the federal permitting dashboard.

We do not expect any further mitigation measures or conditions to be imposed, nor any additional federal government reviews or approvals to be required in order to take a final investment decision. Overall, we have received strong government support throughout this process for our project, which received a FAST-41 transparency project designation as a priority U.S. critical mineral project. Turning to our dual-track customer offtake and project financing processes, Smackover Lithium, alongside our experienced financial advisers, continues to make excellent progress. With our planned 22,500 tons of annual nameplate lithium carbonate capacity, we are targeting approximately 80% of that production to be under long-term offtake contracts. Our first offtake agreement with Trafigura for up to 8,000 tons represents over 40% of targeted offtake.

The partnership expects to reach agreements on all remaining advanced offtake negotiations by the third quarter. We remain focused on securing the best possible terms under these agreements in order to support our project financing efforts. All material offtake terms must be agreed upon before the final sizing and structure of the project finance package can be determined. The joint venture remains confident in its ability to reach a positive outcome in these negotiations, thus allowing for FID to be taken for construction to begin in 2026. Assuming we begin construction on this timeline, we expect to achieve first commercial production in 2029. I will round out my remarks by touching on East Texas. We are continuing to improve the definition of our resource position through additional drilling and process test work at the Franklin project and in the region more broadly, aiming to release a preliminary economic assessment, or PEA, for the Franklin project in 2026, and plan to follow that with a preliminary feasibility study, or PFS, in early 2027.

It is important to outline the project economics of that world-class resource in order to gain further recognition for this important and underappreciated part of our asset portfolio. We will continue to work on maiden inferred resource reports for our two other potential projects in the area, all while continuing to expand our leasehold footprint in East Texas. I will now turn it over to Salah to discuss our financial results.

Salah I. Gamoudi: The first quarter ended 03/31/2026, we reported a net loss of $2.7 million, as compared to a loss of $1 million for the quarter ended 03/31/2025. In the quarter, G&A decreased slightly by $100,000, while demonstration plant costs increased by $400,000 year over year. The slight decrease in G&A demonstrates our continued commitment to cost discipline, as despite growth in employee headcount and activity in order to support the development of our portfolio of projects, we have found offsetting cost savings in certain audit, legal, and consulting expenses. The demo plant increase was driven by higher personnel and supply costs associated with R&D activities along with maintenance and site improvement activities.

As mentioned by Andy, the work that we do at the demonstration plant will continue to be critical and a real differentiator for us. Additionally, we incurred a non-cash foreign exchange gain of $2.2 million during the quarter. This foreign exchange gain was due to having significantly higher average U.S. dollar cash balances as a result of our $130 million follow-on offering in October, as well as fluctuations in exchange rates between U.S. and Canadian dollars and the resultant non-cash accounting impact on those cash balances held by one of our Canadian-dollar functional currency entities. Below operating expenses on the income statement, we recorded a higher investment loss from joint ventures of $1.5 million for the quarter versus $1 million in the prior period.

This increase reflects expanded operational activity at the Smackover Lithium partnership level in connection with commercial and financing initiatives, as well as increased corporate and administrative support as project development activities progress. We also recorded an $800,000 loss on the fair value of our contingent FID payments that are to be received by Standard Lithium Ltd. from our partner Equinor, should we reach a positive FID at our SWA and/or East Texas projects by certain dates. This was primarily related to revisions to assumptions on expected milestone timing rather than a change in the overall probability of achieving FID. We also recognized $1 million in additional interest income year over year, driven by our higher average cash balances.

We ended the quarter with strong cash and working capital positions of $141 million and $139.5 million, respectively. Standard Lithium Ltd. made JV capital contributions of $17.9 million during the first quarter, of which $9.6 million and $8.3 million went towards SWA and East Texas, respectively. For Southwest Arkansas, the contributions allow us to continue to advance key project milestones as we approach FID and enable us to continue advancing technical and engineering workstreams. For East Texas, the contribution is primarily for advancing our understanding of the resource, continuing to expand our leasehold footprint, and continuing along a path to our preliminary economic assessment with a preliminary feasibility study to follow. Securing an attractive and comprehensive project finance package is a critical part of the final investment decision for SWA.

The approximate $1.5 billion of base project CapEx per RDFS, in addition to potential cost overrun facilities, reserve accounts, or other incremental capital requirements, are expected to be financed by a combination of senior secured project debt, our $225 million grant from the DOE, as well as respective funding contributions from Standard Lithium Ltd. and Equinor. The joint venture is targeting approximately $1.1 billion total in senior secured, limited-recourse project debt supported by three leading major export credit agencies, including the Export-Import Bank of the United States and Export Finance Norway, along with a strong syndicate of commercial banks. The remaining 55% pro rata equity contribution required by Standard Lithium Ltd.

will be supported by the proceeds from our equity raise last year. Any cost overrun facilities, contingencies, minimum working capital balances, or reserve accounts over and above base project CapEx requirements remain subject to negotiation with the lenders, with quantums to be determined. We have already received expressions of interest from the ECAs and commercial banks exceeding our total targeted project debt. Additionally, initial responses included indicative terms that were consistent with our expectations and validated certain assumptions regarding the cost, term structure, and conditions that are customary for project debt facilities of this nature. While we await finalization of our remaining commercial offtake agreements, which will ultimately finalize the size and structure of the SWA project debt, we continue to progress important project financing work in the interim around due diligence, structuring and documentation, credit, and other approvals, such that we are in a position to reach financial close and draw down shortly thereafter.

In other words, the offtake process is not holding up advancement of the project financing workstreams, as we remain on our targeted timelines. I will now turn it back over to David for closing remarks.

David Park: Thanks, Salah. We understand how important 2026 is for Standard Lithium Ltd. as we approach a final investment decision for the initial phase of our Southwest Arkansas project. We will provide timely updates as we conclude all remaining work in the coming months and progress against our plan, which remains to approve FID and begin construction in 2026. Standard Lithium Ltd. continues to be extremely well positioned and poised for growth, with a portfolio of high-quality and scalable assets, including in East Texas, and to be a leading domestic critical minerals producer in the United States. Thanks again for joining us today. Operator, I will turn it back to you.

Q&A Session

Operator: We will now open the call for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press star and the number 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by now while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Max S. Yerrill with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Max S. Yerrill: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. As you work through the vendor contracting process, I was just wondering how the cost of these are tracking towards what you expected from the get-go? Thanks.

David Park: Thanks a lot, Max. Andy, I will turn that one to you. You are closer.

J. Andrew Robinson: Sure. Thanks, Max. The DFS is still pretty current, and the FEED study that underpinned that DFS means a lot of the original vendor build-up is still quite fresh. We are going to be releasing the two principal contracting entities on a limited notice to proceed in the very near future, and at that point they are going to be refreshing, through vendor outreach, some of the expected costs. We have not seen pricing change significantly where we have been tracking pricing to date, but in the contracting vendor engagement process we have made allowances for escalation and tariffs in our pricing model right now. We have been keeping an eye on it, and that will get formalized as we go through that LNTP process prior to taking the final investment decision. Hopefully that answered your question, Max.

Max S. Yerrill: Good, thank you. And then maybe one more. From where we were when you set off on the offtake discussions, we have seen a huge rally in lithium prices. Are there any goalpost changes on potential floors or ceilings from when you started the offtake discussions? Any color you can share there would be very helpful.

David Park: Thanks, Max. Good question. Lithium carbonate pricing has improved materially over the last year; you are well aware of that. As a result, starting in about the fourth quarter and then the first quarter of this year, we had more counterparties come back to the table that were able to present us with pricing mechanisms that worked for us and supported our financing than we had last year. The best way of thinking about it is there is more depth to our discussions, and we are running a competitive process to finalize our offtake agreements. We have our first agreement in place with Trafigura, as you are well aware, for 8,000 tons, and now we are working with multiple counterparties to finalize agreements. We think we know who those counterparties are going to be. We have a good feel for the volumes, the duration, and the pricing mechanisms, and we feel much better about it than I would have last fall.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Anthony Taglieri with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Anthony Taglieri: Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe just on CapEx at the project level for this year, what would be a reasonable expectation for spend there, given that construction is probably going to be starting towards the end of the year? Some thoughts there would be helpful. Thanks.

David Park: Andy, do you want to take that one, or should we turn that to Salah?

J. Andrew Robinson: Let us have Salah handle that one.

Salah I. Gamoudi: Sure, happy to. From a go-forward perspective, as Andy mentioned, we will be releasing the EPC contractors on a limited notice to proceed basis, and that is where you are going to eventually find whatever the final CapEx print is. Once those procurement activities have been kicked off and you have gotten live vendor quotes, that is when we will be able to define a specific number. In general, we do not expect there to be a huge variation, as Andy mentioned, because our FEED study that the DFS was based on was done fairly recently and involved a lot of direct contact with vendors and quote collection. As we move forward, we do have to account for other things that can come up in regards to capital requirements.

There are contingencies that may be required as part of our debt financing process. As mentioned earlier on the call, cost overrun facilities, debt service reserve accounts, minimum working capital balances, and things like that can increase your capital requirements above and beyond the base CapEx to actually build the facility. We will be working to define that going forward on both the EPC contracting side and in our negotiations and discussions with the project lenders.

Anthony Taglieri: Maybe just on East Texas, any early views or high-level framing you could give us relative to SWA in terms of economics? How should we be thinking about modeling this project pre-PEA?

David Park: Andy, why do you not start with that one?

J. Andrew Robinson: For sure. Anthony, we have not released any economic assessment of the Franklin project or any of our land holdings in East Texas to date. One of the things I would say is that, from experience over the last many years, the grade of lithium is extremely important in the economics of DLE-based projects. As we move from the Southwest Arkansas project, where our average grade is in the 400s to 500s milligrams per liter lithium, into East Texas where we are typically seeing 500+ into the 600s, 700s, and even into the 800s milligrams per liter, we expect that to work very much in our favor. We are selecting a vendor to complete the PEA right now; we expect to get it out as soon as we can in the second half of this calendar year, and we expect the economics to look favorable.

These are world-class resources. The assets are quite incredible in terms of the size and quality of the assets. These are very high-quality assets that are highly amenable to DLE processes and extensions of the flow sheet that we are going to be building at SWA Phase 1. We are looking to carry across all of that learning from the demo plant and from the engineering and FEED studies for SWA Phase 1, translating that into higher-grade assets in East Texas. We think that is going to be a good story.

Anthony Taglieri: That is great, thank you. And then maybe just one more. Have offtakers started asking you questions about East Texas—when you might think that project could be in production—and how that starts factoring into these discussions? I imagine the focus is SWA right now, but as an offtaker, they would be looking at longer production timelines and where you might get to eventually.

David Park: The offtakers we are talking to are people that want to be partners with us for a long time. The specific negotiations are very Southwest Arkansas-focused, but their interest in entering into long-term partnership with Standard Lithium Ltd. is driven beyond Southwest Arkansas, and they are very attracted by the potential we have in East Texas so we can continue to grow together.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Eric Boyes with Evercore ISI. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Eric Boyes: Thanks for taking my questions. First, we spend a lot of time talking about sensitivity to lithium price and CapEx, but can you talk to the production volume variability of DLE, if any, in Southwest Arkansas?

David Park: Andy, do you want to hit that?

J. Andrew Robinson: Sure thing. Eric, we have designed the facility at Southwest Arkansas Phase 1 to be effectively constrained by the production of lithium carbonate. We design for how much lithium carbonate we want to produce on an annual basis, and then we design everything else around that in terms of the brine supply. Because of the quality of the resource at Southwest Arkansas, we have, in very simple terms, more brine than we need to support the operation of that facility. We expect to be able to run the facility at nameplate for very long periods of time—multi-decades of operation—because of the relative size of the resource that we have relative to the production facilities. We will see some natural small-scale fluctuations in annual capacity, but in simple terms, we have a plant that we can more than supply with resource to maintain good, even production capacity at the facility.

That is the general philosophy, and it is the basis for the long-term offtake contracts that we are in the process of finalizing and signing.

Eric Boyes: Appreciate that. Second, another on East Texas: how much of the Southwest Arkansas engineering package can you realistically replicate there? What parts of the design are likely to change?

J. Andrew Robinson: We are extremely fortunate. One of the reasons why we are in the Smackover is that the geochemistry of the brines is, from an engineering and flow sheet design point of view, very similar from one region we are operating in to the next. In simple terms, we are able to translate directly large parts of both the plan and the Southwest Arkansas flow sheet into East Texas. It is actually a little simpler in East Texas; we do not have any sour gas, for the most part, to deal with in our project areas. There are certain parts of the flow sheet that can be minimized or removed when we translate from Southwest Arkansas to East Texas, which will be helpful. For the most part, we are moving with a similar flow sheet, and we definitely hope to be able to translate established vendors from Southwest Arkansas—obviously established contracting partners as well—into East Texas.

The philosophy of why we are in the Smackover is that we can, to a large extent, replicate our flow sheet, introduce simplicity, introduce efficiencies, and maintain key vendor, supplier, and contractor relationships, so that we can minimize redesign cycles, shorten timelines, increase efficiencies, and optimize where it makes sense. We intend to modularize as much as we can and copy-paste as much as is reasonable from one project to the next to capture efficiencies in both construction and operations.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Joseph George Reagor with ROTH Capital Partners. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Joseph George Reagor: Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Bigger-picture question: I have been seeing more talk across multiple oilfield locations about the potential to recover other minerals—not just lithium—from the brines and from the wastewater, and also some government support for this, including things on the critical minerals list like rare earths. Any opportunity there for you guys? I guess it is maybe too late with Southwest Arkansas, but maybe with East Texas to add other potential minerals to your revenue profile?

David Park: I will start and then turn it to Andy as well. First, you are correct—Southwest Arkansas is solely focused on lithium. For the Southwest Arkansas project, you should not include any expectation of any other revenue stream. With East Texas, we do have the opportunity to pursue other minerals. Andy can flesh that out.

J. Andrew Robinson: Hey, Joe. We identified in the maiden inferred resource assessment the potential bromine and potash resource, which is there as well, both of which are high quality and very sizable. As we move forward through the PEA, we have not made a decision yet whether to include potential economics of those other resources in the PEA, but we very much understand that there are some very high-quality resources there—bromine and potash are the ones we have identified so far. There may well be other potential within the Smackover brines in East Texas, but from a simple grade and magnitude point of view, those are probably the ones that we are going to advance and figure out a little bit more in the future.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Theophilos Genzebu with Raymond James. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Theophilos Genzebu: Thanks, guys. Just one for me. On NEPA, it was mentioned in the past that there was a public commentary period. Can you update us on that progression? I know you are expecting the process to be completed by the end of the second quarter, so any extra light you can shed there would be great.

David Park: Great question. We feel very confident where we sit with respect to the NEPA process. The public comment period is closed. We believe the report is finalized or near finalized, and we hope to have some good news this quarter in that respect. The process has moved forward, and we have not encountered any negative surprises along the way.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Noel Augustus Parks with Tuohy Brothers Investment Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Noel Augustus Parks: Hi. Good afternoon. It was interesting to hear about the discussions so far about brine characteristics and content across your different target regions. From the original South Arkansas demo to Southwest and then to East Texas now, I am curious about the reservoir characteristics and whether they are also fairly uniform across these different Smackover regions—things like pressure and how they behave under a depletion/replenishment cycle. Is there any variation on that?

J. Andrew Robinson: The bromine facilities in southern Arkansas have been operating for six decades now, so there is a huge amount of information on how the Smackover reservoir produces and can be reinjected. We have been able to lean on an absolutely gigantic amount of data on how the formation behaves. In our SWA project area in Lafayette and Columbia Counties, we have been, over the years, incredibly pleasantly surprised by the producibility of that project area. We have great-quality rock and are very comfortable with its ability to both produce brine and reinject the tail brine—the waste brine, spent brine—back into the formation to maintain pressures for multi-decade production. As we moved into East Texas, based on what we have learned in the region working with LANXESS over their very large footprint—150,000+ acres of leases in Union County in Arkansas—and all of the work that we have done in and around Southwest Arkansas, we were highly deliberate when we started the work in East Texas five years ago.

We understand how to look for the best areas of porosity and permeability in the formation, where those are found, and how to position projects. Because we had that huge first-mover advantage in the Smackover, as we have expanded our footprint, we have been very deliberate and coherent in building out lease packages and project positions to take advantage of the areas of the Smackover which, in simple terms, work best. Your point is a good one: the Smackover, from a reservoir point of view, is quite variable. There are areas with lower porosity and therefore lower permeability, and areas with more complex geological structures with a lot of faulting and discontinuity of flows. Those are areas that we have specifically avoided as we started five years ago in East Texas.

We have been very deliberate in terms of where we have positioned our projects in the Smackover to take advantage of the same reservoir characteristics that we have come to know working on the LANXESS projects and in Southwest Arkansas.

Noel Augustus Parks: Certainly does. And from that, it is fair to say that as far as the competitive lead you have against other entrants or other players that maybe are not so active right now, it would seem to reinforce that—others cannot just jump in and lease what is unleased and expect great results everywhere.

J. Andrew Robinson: I will not speak to other people’s projects, but the quality of the reservoir definitely varies spatially, both east–west and north–south along the formation. As a project developer, one needs to be very deliberate to pick the right rock that will actually support production. That has been our philosophy from the start and something we have very deliberately applied as we have expanded our footprint and resources in the area.

Noel Augustus Parks: Terrific. And then on the offtake/financing picture, I was curious—in terms of the partners you are talking with, several of which I imagine are the usual suspects who expect to be interested in lithium—are any of those parties themselves in partnership with other strategic or financial parties? A few years ago EV-related capital was driving a lot of interest; now you have AI power capital also thinking about energy storage. Are you seeing a manufacturer and some other type of fund stepping up alongside them?

David Park: Interesting question. On the offtake side, from day one we have focused on seeking out partners or customers with strong balance sheets that are exposed to various segments of the lithium market. We are involved in discussions with players that represent all those different demand nodes for lithium at this point in time. We are careful not to put all our eggs in the EV basket. It is important to have exposure to that basket; it is a very large part of the market, but it is not the only part. We are going to make sure that we are exposed to the AI and data center trade as well. On the project financing side, it is export credit agencies that we are talking to about providing the non- or limited-recourse financing for the project.

Operator: We have now reached the end of the Q&A session. This concludes today’s call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.