Issue No. 5, November 19, 2024

Summary Updates since September 3
The Kairos Interface has reached over 225,000 regulatory recordspermits, bonds, violations, and underwriterscovering 20 jurisdictions—a mix of coal, mineral, metal, and oil and gas commoditiesin the U.S. New jurisdictions include New Mexico, South Dakota, and Louisiana. The Kairos Database now contains more than 27,000 bond records of nearly $12 billion in aggregate underwriting exposure.

We also have cued up four more jurisdictionsArkansas, Illinois, Kansas, and Mississippicompleting all the actively producing coal States, and the addition of mineral and quarry regulatory records for California and Florida.

Level of Kairos Access
Currently we are offering two subscription versions: a version containing only regulatory records and a version containing an increasing number of Advanced Analytics. We will continue offering access to the Trial Version through the year.

Next up
We are working on final upgrades to both versions of the Kairos Interface, including the data export functions.

Kairos  .   .  .  Simple, yet dynamic

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Issue No. 4, September 3, 2024

Summary Updates since July 25
August was a busy month for new developments to the Kairos Interface! We released an upgraded version of the Interface. Highlights include changing how the search engine radio buttons, such as for the Permit, Bond, Current, and History options, behave, so that now you can select a combination of options before starting the search. Also, we added a new display group option, "Advanced Analytics," including field categories such as "Cost-To-Reclaim (CTR) Estimates" and "Site Rankings." But we removed the "All Records" search option to avoid the maze of merging Current and History records. Lastly, we added two additional agency datasets: Alabama Coal and Oklahoma Coal, as well as updated a number of current agency datasets.

Level of Kairos Access
These two recently added agency datasets are only available on the Kairos Client and Subscription versions, not Trial version. Likewise, upcoming updates to the 17 jurisdictions already active in Kairos will only be released on the Client and Subscription versions. However, later this week, we plan releasing the first Oil and Gas agency dataset, and these Oklahoma O&G permit data will be available in all versions of Kairos. With this release is a new Permit display field, "O&G or Landfill Supplement," dedicated to providing additional information specific to these new commodities and activities. Additionally, we will provide forthcoming examples of Advanced Analytics in the Trial version. In future, SIAS Global produced analyses and evaluations, such as site ranks, CTR estimates, permit Cluster Reports, and site Snapshots, will become increasingly available and updated in the Kairos Client and Subscription versions exclusively.

Next up
Based on client requests, our priorities currently include preparing datasets for Colorado coal, metals, and minerals, as well as mixed commodities for New Mexico and Ohio, with Texas O&G permits to follow the release of the Oklahoma O&G dataset. But even with these jurisdictions and commodities cued up, we still are far from the full complement of jurisdictions and commodities in preparation for release over the next few months!

Kairos  .   .  .  Simple, yet dynamic

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Issue No. 3, July 25, 2024

Summary Updates since July 10
The Kairos Interface is recently upgraded and the Kairos Database has exceeded 215,000 regulatory records—permits, bonds, violations, and underwriters—covering 14 jurisdictions—a mix of coal, mineral, and metal commodities—in the U.S. The three new jurisdictions are Maryland, Nevada, and Utah. The Kairos Database now contains more than 8,000 active underwriter records of over $11.5 billion in aggregate underwriting exposure.

We also have cued up two more jurisdictions—Alabama and Colorado—and the addition of mineral and quarry regulatory records for Ohio and Virginia. Lastly, regulatory and bond records for jurisdictions, such as Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and others, are current as of June and July of this year.

Level of Kairos Access
This recent agency update is the last scheduled for the Kairos Trial version through the summer. The next scheduled updates are only for the Client and Subscription versions of Kairos, taking priority for updates to existing agency data and the rolling out of new data.

New Display Tables and Searchable Activities
We have been preparing and processing agency data for Oil and Gas and for Landfills and now are working on how these data will be searchable and displayed in the Kairos Interface. Likewise, for Advanced Analytics, we are designing an entirely new display table for the Kairos Interface to include such categories as Cost-To-Reclaim Estimates and Site Rankings. We plan deploying a sample of these new data on the Kairos Trial version while full implementation is prioritized on the Kairos Client and Subscription versions.

Kairos  .   .  .  Simple, yet dynamic

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Issue No. 2, July 10, 2024

Summary Updates since June 25
The Kairos Interface is recently upgraded and the Kairos Database has exceeded 200,000 regulatory records—permits, bonds, violations, and underwriters—covering 11 jurisdictions—a mix of coal, mineral, and metal commodities—in the U.S. We have cued up three more regulatory agencies for pipeline processing this week and will soon have all existing agencies as current as in our master-database collection pool.

In addition to functional improvements and fixes to the Kairos Interface, we have limited the number of selected regulatory records for exporting or for cycling through different display groups, such as from Permits to Bonds, to 3,000 records. This limit is to avoid browsers from crashing or timing out, particularly on phones. But not selecting any records before cycling to a different display group will still carry all the records from the original results to the next display group.

Lastly, fully implemented is selecting specific underwriters from the Underwriter Index and searching Kairos for associated bonds and permits to view what different underwriters are bonding, where, and for how much in any of the jurisdictions loaded in the Kairos Database.

Level of Kairos Access
We will continue to update existing agency data and add some new agency data to the Kairos Trial version through July, but moving forward the Client and Subscription versions of Kairos will take priority for updates to existing agency data and the rolling out of new data, as well as new features and display tables.

New Display Tables and Searchable Activities
This month we are building and integrating three new display tables. Two are dedicated to agency data, one for Landfills and one for Oil and Gas, and the third is dedicated to SIAS Advanced Analytics, such as Cost-To-Reclaim Estimates and Site Rankings. As the summer progresses, we will implement the initial Advanced Analytics tables on the Kairos Client servers first.

Future Kairos Interface Upgrades and Tools
The next upgrades to the Kairos Interface will correspond with the initial releases of the new display tables but also include a new tool for exporting geographic information for permits, as either a GeoJson file or a KMZ file, to open in apps such as Google Earth.

Kairos  .   .  .  Simple, yet dynamic

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June 28, 2024: Kairos exceeds 100,000 regulatory records with thousands of more updates and new Permit, GIS, Bond, and Violation records cued up for the coming weeks! What can Kairos tell you about the extractive industries, such as coal, metals, and minerals, across the U.S.?

Kairos  .   .  .  Simple, yet dynamic

Issue No. 1, June 25, 2024

We pushed through some additional small fixes to the K-Interface over the weekend. One item we are hoping to resolve by week's end has to do with the number of records selected in the Permit Fields display and carrying them over to the Bonds Fields or Violation Fields display. For example, when selecting more than 100 records to carry over, this function results in an error forcing one to clear the search entirely. By not selecting any records, however, cycling through the different field display groups is not a problem.

We also pushed up some new regulatory data and spruced up some existing. We still are hovering at 10 jurisdictions with mixed commodities. These jurisdictions are fully complemented datasets now, meaning covering the three primary data types (Permit, GIS, Bonds, and Violations), and we have exceeded well over 100,000 records in Kairos. So this week we are planning to bring up two to three more jurisdictions from our mainframe into the Kairos environment.

For PA DEP, you might see some bond numbers in scientific notation. For a few bonds, the agency records incredibly long number strings. So for now we entered them as scientific notation into the Kairos system.

Lastly, among new K-Interface tools we are developing, soon we will roll out a tool for exporting geographic information from Kairos in two file formats, GeoJson and KMZ, the latter of which can be opened directly in Google Earth.

Our next Kairos Update will provide details on our objectives to integrate agency data for Oil and Gas and for Landfills into Kairos.

Kairos  .   .  .  Simple, yet dynamic

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