Categories: Energy
Topics: General Energy

Patriot Battery Metals (CSE: PMET)(OTC: PMETF) CEO Blair Way on ASX Listing, Hitting More Lithium Bearing Pegmatite & New Pegmatite Discoveries

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the President and CEO of Patriot Battery Metals, Mr. Blair Way. Blair, great to have you back on. How are you?

Blair Way: I'm doing great, Gerardo. Tons going on, all great stuff. But it's a busy time for Patriot that's for sure.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's get right into it. I'm a contrarian by nature. It's how I was brought up in this business. I don't know if I'm a masochist, a sucker for pain, but I absolutely love the pullback in the share price. And a part of that as I shared with you off air is because I'm likely going to be adding some here soon if it stays at these levels. Whether or not that happens or not, I loved the release that you put out here about a week or so ago, updating the market on the summer drill and surface programs at the Corvette property. And the reason I love it is because I think it finally starts to define and outline the path towards the potential scale here. Right? We've talked about the trend. We've talked about the 50 kilometers, 30 or so of which have been largely unexplored. Though I understand the teams are in the field now, and I wanted to ask you about that.

But we also know that this current drilling that's ongoing, you just described as encountering spodumene pegmatite over varying widths in each drill hole. Now, there was something interesting in the release, you decided that you no longer wanted to be as vocal about just how much of that spodumene pegmatite and the pegmatite in general you were actually encountering. And the reason for that, if I understand it correctly, is there was a bit of confusion as to the discrepancy between how much of it was lithium bearing and how much of it was just pegmatite rock. Is that accurate?

Blair Way: Yeah, that's true. And of course the other thing is we've drilled out a large part of this almost two kilometer corridor now, and we've hit the big intercepts. People have seen them, they understand the intercepts there. We put the assays out on them. And obviously, there's always discrepancy. Pegmatite does not translate to lithium bearing rock. It's the spodumene within the pegmatite that has the lithium. So there's always some discrepancy, but initially you're like, we've got peg. That's a good thing. We're going to now tell you the assays. And we've got the assays and we can tell how much of that was mineralized with lithium.

So now we're drilling it out. It just seems almost redundant, almost a little bit over promotional. Okay. Oh yeah, we got another 50 meters, another 70 meters or whatever the number is of peg when we know the assays are going to come in. We sort of have an understanding now when we look at the cores what they're going to look like. We can't talk about lithium until we have the assays, even if we understand it from the spodumene mineralization.

So yeah, our approach to this now is if we drill a new hole in a new area where our investors aren't really familiar with what we're encountering, then yes, we'll talk about those pegmatite intercepts. But because we're really in a way delineating this 1.4 to two kilometer corridor that we're working on, talking about the pegmatite intercepts is becoming a little bit redundant. It's about the lithium mineralization throughout the whole body and what that translates into the model. And soon we'll be able to share the model and people get a much clearer understanding of what those intercepts mean, both the pegmatite and the lithium mineralization.

Gerardo Del Real: Sounds like a company and a team that already understands the model and what it means. And I'm looking forward to the mapping and the model here soon as you described. Now with that being said, you added another 300 meters along strike from the CV5 pegmatite outcrop towards CV6. I know that drilling is ongoing. How is that coming along? And then let's talk about the surface work in a second.

Blair Way: The drilling's going great. And as we said in the news release, we are encountering pegmatite in every hole. And yeah, it's going as we expected. Our model is becoming more accurate. The more data we put in, the more accurate it is, the more predictable the drill holes become. So when we're drilling, we see the peg, we see this spodumene mineralization, but we do have to wait until we have the assays before we can talk about it in a sort of open forum. That's just the regulations. And it makes more sense to prevent this sort of over promotion or just over talking about the peg. We know the peg's there. We know some of it's mineralized, and we just will report on that as it comes. But as we drill out towards CV6 and we drill out around CV1, which we know you had that hole number 17 with that great intercept, we want to understand more there. We're drilling it to a deeper depth so we can understand how deep it goes.

But again, the intercepts are there. We just are now really focused on the lithium mineralization and the grade. And then that will translate into our model.

Gerardo Del Real: I know priority one is proving up the model to hopefully work towards at least a triple digit tonnage here in maybe late Q3, maybe Q4, whenever that happens. Right? But I'd be lying to you if I told you I wasn't excited to hear that the surface work has resulted in the discovery of several new spodumene bearing pegmatite outcrops, giving that's the host rock and given that thus far every single drill hole has been successful. Tell me a bit about how the work program on site is going?

Blair Way: So we've got a pretty decent crew. We've got a great crew on the ground. A good number of guys are basically going to look at the existing outcrops, numbering all the way up to CV12. But they've also been looking at new ground and in around a Deca-Goose area, that ground that we picked up last winter and some of the other areas.

But what they're also doing is a much more methodical review of the ground. As I think we discussed before when these original outcrops were found, they were very quick, four or five day campaigns where the helicopters stopped down, take a look, grab a sample and move on, because of time constraints and money constraints. This summer, they're very methodically going through and they're doing a great job and we'll be able to report on that. I hope either next week or the following week we should have something to talk about that we can share.

Because again, as we gather this data, we have to document it accurately. Because when we put it up we have to be very careful about what we disseminate in a news release. So it has to be doubled and triple checked. So we're seeing some very good signs and good indicators, but as we document, as we give assays on some of the samples that we're tagging, doing channel sampling, all that sort of stuff. As that data becomes available, then we can share it in a proper map with the proper information to demonstrate just what we have.

So, that's expanding our blue sky and that's beyond the two kilometer corridor at CV6, 5, and 1. We have this great deal of other potential corridors that we ideally will be able to talk more about and also talk about what drill strategies we have for those new areas.

Gerardo Del Real: I hate to put you on the spot but given the fact that I like to say that I'm a simple guy and my simple self was able to, and now I'm really excited about the potential scale of this and the world class nature of this, if I was able to identify that pretty early on when this thing was at like $0.16 cents and we were writing checks together trying to keep everything going, I have to believe that by now some of the majors have likely reached out. And without getting into specifics because I know you won't, Blair, I've known you for quite some time now. Are there discussions ongoing as to the potential of the project here?

Blair Way: Certainly. As you know, PDAC is a busy time and we just finished up PDAC. And  suffice to say there was quite a bit of interest and we've had quite a few discussions and conversations. And look, there are opportunities here for the company as we grow the scale of what we have here. And what that translates to in the short term, hard to say. But again, with and over time, I think we'll see very strong interest in what we have given the scale. And as we approach triple digit numbers, that suddenly becomes very meaningful for some of these bigger players in the lithium space.

Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to the news on the model, the mapping, and of course assays as they start coming in. Blair, thanks for taking the time for the update. I appreciate it.

Blair Way: Oh, always happy to do an update. And yeah, there's still a ton of news to come. We've got our TSX, ASX, assays, drill assays, field work assays. It's a busy summer. We're going to probably do some more site visits. I'll certainly be up to site a couple more times this summer. Yeah, it's a busy time for us in the summertime. It's a bit of a doldrumry time for the market. Summertime is historically a time when the markets go a bit soggy but it's certainly created what I see as a buying opportunity, for sure with the share price sort of off the boil right now due to summer doldrums. I think it's a good opportunity.

Gerardo Del Real: It's 103 degrees here in Austin, Texas. I love shopping for winter coats in the summertime, Blair. Thanks again for your time.

Blair Way: Sounds good. Gerardo, talk to you later.

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