Patriot Battery Metals (CSE: PMET)(OTC: PMETF) CEO Blair Way on Derisking the Largest Hard Rock Lithium Deposit in North America?

Blair Way: I'm doing great. It's great to be on talking again, telling you everything we're up to. It's a big week this week as we lead into PDAC. So yeah, we've got a lot ahead of us for sure.

Blair Way: Absolutely. And as you said, it is a fairly complicated or technical press release. So it probably takes some time for people to really digest and truly understand, but this is all part of that process. As you've already alluded to, you first do your drilling, you get a discovery, you find what you're looking for. You find it in the scale, you find it in the grade, and then you got to start proving that it's actually something that's economic, in order to do so you've got to ensure that the mineralogy is right, and then you do the metallurgy, which is just the next step after mineralogy. So the press release we put out yesterday morning was just about that. So the mineralogy is coming in, we're seeing primarily the lithium is contained in the spodumene, which is what you want.

We have very little lepidolite which is more of a problem in the biotites. So what basically the mineralogy is a positive result. We're seeing the lithium where we want it to be for getting some clarity, ensurity on the actual mineral processing side and the metallurgy. So, to get this spodumene accounting for 86 to 99% of the lithium deportment is fantastic. That's what we want to see. There's no petalite, petalite is a problem child. Again, that's the sort of thing we want, as well as the tantalum bearing minerals or columbite and tantalite again, these are all positive.

So really we just put another sort of tick in the box, which we will continue to do. We've got the metallurgy following up late, is in progress now. We're chasing to make a spodumene concentrate, grading around greater than 6%. And we want to be able to demonstrate that we can get decent recovery out of that. That's still work that's underway. But the mineralogy is certainly that first step. And it's telling us everything we want to know. And it's certainly not showing us any fatal flaws at this stage.

Blair Way: No, absolutely. We've got a total of 50 kilometers. We've barely touched 20, 25 of it, and we still have another 25 to go, and keep in mind, we haven't put a drill bit in any of the other outcrops, we put it in the CV12. So this summer we have a rig that's basically dedicated to those outcrops to ideally identify another corridor like we already have at the CV6, CV5, CV1 corridor. And this is all about scale. We're seeking to find a lithium bearing pegmatites. We found those, we found a fairly sizable one, which as you said, is certainly looking to be in the order of a hundred plus million tonnes. And that's fantastic, but it's also worth keeping in mind that these are our first 24 holes, 25 holes that we put in the ground, just in this corridor.

We still have a number of other corridors to investigate. And well, there's a very good chance we still haven't had our best drill hole to date. It's unlikely that our first drill hole was our best drill hole. And it's even equally safe to say that it's quite likely that our next corridor we find could be better than this corridor. But what we are doing now is proving scale. So we'll continue to advance this corridor, the CV6, 5 to 1 corridor, but these other outcrops this summer, we'll be putting drill holes into them to better understand what we have there, and ideally we have other corridors. So then this winter to carry on drilling and prove them up as well.

Blair Way: So the quicker answer for that is we expect it in Q4. We have a big drill program still remaining ahead of us. We got over 15,000 meters, two of the drills are turning now. And as you said, the third rig is coming in. I'd expect it late June, early July, as it mobilized to site. We're also bringing a barge so that we can do some work on the lakes, because we believe there may be some connectivity that we need to continue exploring both on the ground and in the lakes, as well as the guys on the ground that are exploring not only, or investigating not only the outcrops that we have identified in the past, but also looking at the other remaining 25 to 30 kilometers of our trend to just identify what else is there. And again, prioritize where the rig goes first, second, and third or fourth.

So by the end of the summer, two rigs have been working on building on a resource. The other rig is looking at identifying additional corridors, which we then would advance as we have done this winter with this corridor. So then we roll into winter and the plan would be a much bigger program. Assuming we have other corridors to work through.

Blair Way: Yeah. I mean, the labs are a bit of a pain, but it comes in fits and starts, but yeah, we are still continuing to get it in. And I certainly expect to see some results again, I never like to say what day, because the labs will often not get it right to the day, but we certainly have, I think it's 14 holes left. I believe we're probably going to get a block of those in, and we'll have some results shortly. And then the last will probably be towards the end of the month. So I'd say we'd probably got a couple more fresh releases and results to get us to the end of the month.

Blair Way: Well, we're already cutting core now. So, we're drilling, the two rigs are drilling now. We picked up where we left off in hole 34. So hole 35 is just an offset to the west from hole 34. And we're already seeing the pegmatite in there as we expected. So yeah, we're already going to be shipping core. I would say core will be going to the labs in another, I'd say probably later this week or early next week. So we're only going to have a short, a brief period in between where we are not waiting on assays before we are going to have more assays coming in again. So it's great. We're going to have a very busy summer.

Blair Way: No, there's absolutely no logical reason why we would do a financing at this stage. We had a $13 million war chest that we've been working away at in order for this 20,000 meter drill program of which we've done 4,500 meters. Believe it or not, we still have 12 million or so bucks in the bank, as we start the 15,000 meters for the summer and fall program. And the reason being is we've had, as you can imagine, we've had quite a few 25 cent warrants coming in, given the share price that we've seen over the last couple, really over the last month or two. So as we spend money, it's the flow-through dollars are being topped up with our warrant money. So really, short to midterm there's just no requirement to do any sort of financing. And we'll just keep working. We've got this big runway ahead of us of work. We just put our head down, focus on that, get the results out, demonstrate what we have and really it's the proof is in the pudding. And that's what we're doing this summer.

Blair Way: Absolutely. I mean, the Australian markets seem to better understand these hard rock lithium projects, and therefore the valuations typically are considerably higher. In some cases I've seen up to five times multiplier for comparable scale Quebec or Ontario properties that are held by an SX company versus a TSX listed company. So we are progressing that listing it's sort of a slow process, but all things going to plan. I'd say we should be able to see some conclusion somewhere in July the way things are going.

Blair Way: It's always great to catch up Gerardo and yeah, we've got quite a summer ahead of us and it's exciting to be part of this and have our shareholders so strongly supporting us as we move this project forward. Because we think we really have something pretty substantial and we just, as I said, we just keep our head down, keep working at it and yeah, the project is going great.

Blair Way: Thanks. Gerardo, talk to you later.