Categories: Base Metals
Topics: General Base Metals

Patriot Battery Metals (CSE: PMET)(OTC: PMETF) President Blair Way on New Lithium Pegmatite Discovery 8.5km away & Commencement of Drilling at Corvette Lithium Property in Quebec

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president of Patriot Battery Metals, Mr. Blair Way. Blair, how are you? A busy week for the company. A busy month, a busy year.

Blair Way: Absolutely. It's great to catch up again. We seem to be catching up a great deal with all the news that we're putting out on all the activity we have, but it's all for good reasons, so, yeah, it's fantastic to give you another update.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's dig right into it. You had some news just two days ago where you discovered new lithium pegmatites and this actually happened during a 2021 surface exploration campaign, and you sampled some really, really interesting grades, 8.5 kilometers, I believe, west. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I know it's 8.5 kilometers away from where we've seen the most recent results. So, I want to get into that.

And then just this morning, you announced that – never a dull moment, right – the drill rigs have arrived for this season's drilling campaign. A lot of excitement and a lot of attention around this new lithium district. I can't wait to start getting results there. You want to give us a brief overview of everything going on?

Blair Way: Yeah. So I guess we'll do the easy one first, which is the most recent press release where the two drill rigs are now on the ground. The first rig was a bit earlier and we collared the hole and we started drilling. The ice thickness is perfect. The boys are getting lots of good work done. As I said, both rigs will be turning. First one's turning. Second one's being mobilized in onto the first hole for that rig. So we have a lot going on, on the ground. We've got a pretty big team up there. Weather's cooperating. The ice is cooperating. So we're all moving forward in the right direction, and that's fantastic. You never know till you get there, how the ice thickness is going to support the drill program, but it's over 24 inches thick in most places. So we're well into safe working areas there.

The earlier press release this week is probably a bit more complicated than most people are accustomed to, but it really was an opportunity for us to demonstrate the scale of our property. So we did our drill program last fall, around CV5 and CV6, which is a 1.8 kilometer trend of lithium outcrops that we've been working on. But as you mentioned, in 2019, the guys did discover some pegmatite on the ground, did a little bit of quick sampling. We did some further sampling in 2022, and then put the last drill hole that we did at the end of last fall, when at CV12, just to try and find out what's going on there, and it's delivered some fantastic results, which to us, indicate that we may well have the opportunity to find similar outcrops, especially on some of the new ground that we've acquired.

So, the press release we put out on the Tuesday certainly may have been a bit more technical than most people are accustomed to, but it really is talking about the ice flow, the glacial flow, how boulders have been transported. We then follow that boulder trail upflow and we expect this summer, when we put the boys on the ground, to be able to find some more outcrops in areas that we've never been to before.

Gerardo Del Real: So, tell me a bit about CV12 and this new lithium pegmatite and what you describe as the associated trend and a new discovery, because you mentioned in the release that the largest outcrop is over 140 meters in length and by five to 40 meters in width, right? And then some of the grades that you reported, the samples, were extremely, extremely high grade, not just on the lithium side, but even more pronounced on the tantalum side. Do you understand yet why that is? And I know the likely answer because it's so early on, right? But I suspect that that hole that you put into CV12 was, as you mentioned, to discover a bit more about what's going on there. And my follow up question to that would be when do we get to find out?

Blair Way: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the short answer is, all the work that we've done there, including the drill hole, is indicating to us that the chemistry is right. And that's key for us being able to have a reasonable level of confidence we'll find pegmatites with the right chemistry, meaning we've got lithium and also the tantalum, which what is interesting in the actual CV12 drill hole is finding such a high number of tantalum over a very short 0.4 meter section. But it's still some incredible, highest numbers we found on our property to date, but it is just confirming to us, the chemistry continues to be right, and this is eight kilometers away from the area that we've been doing the drilling at CV5-6 and also into CV1.

So, to answer your question, what do we know about it? It's still early stage. We've got to get guys on the ground as soon as the snow clears, and find out, seek out the source of some of the boulders that we found around CV12, as well as get better understanding at CV12.

And there's also CV8 which is just to the south of CV12. There's still quite a bit of ground, the new ground that we acquired more recently this year, that we haven't been on before. And that's really where the ice is directing us. So, we're going to head up there and take a look. It's still new ground. There's still lots of work to be done, but it's super exciting to be eight kilometers away. The pegmatite is confirming the chemistry is right, and now it really is just putting more boots on the ground, so as to speak, so that we can better understand that area.

And then keeping in mind in the bigger picture, this is eight kilometers away. We've got 50 kilometers, probably another from CV5 and CV1, we've got 20 kilometers to the east, and then 30 kilometers to the west. We've got a ton of work to do this summer, just looking at outcropping and better understanding what other discoveries we may have on that property, let alone the drill program that we're going to be carrying on as well. So it's an exceptionally busy season ahead for us, but it's an exciting time. The geologists are over the moon, in what we may find, or we hope to find on our property.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, as a very biased and invested shareholder, I'm excited that you have the war chest as you've described it in the past, meaning the balance sheet, the treasury to dedicate towards really starting to paint a more complete picture of the district scale potential that exists here. Obviously looking forward to results. The two rigs that are on site now, Blair, can you give us a bit of perspective as to where the initial few holes will be drilled as it relates to the four or five that were reported here from the last program?

Blair Way: Absolutely. So the four holes that we drilled around CV5 and CV6, and then there's a lake to the east of that, those outcrops and those drill holes, so we're drilling on the lake, and we're basically working our way to the east from that, in a direction towards what we've called CV1. So we haven't done any drilling at CV1 on the ground. We will in the summertime. But what we're doing is taking advantage of the frozen lake to give us access to what's beneath the lake. To do that in the summertime is complicated and quite difficult. So basically we're just working our way from the drill hole areas that we did last fall. And we're just working our way across the lake in a grid, as you can imagine. We're doing a hundred, 150 meter spacing with the intent that we can drill it out enough, if the ground delivers that we can actually look at getting some scale of what we have. And also if we can, connect the outcrops that we see on CV1 and connect those to CV5. And that's a 1.8 kilometer area that we have to work our way.

So the drill rigs are basically working one from each end of the lake and working their way towards each other. So, yeah, it's a lot of drilling, but ice is thick. It gives us a longer drilling time. The ice lasts longer, the thicker it is, and it's safer to work on. So yeah, I hope we've got a good eight weeks here that we can be working away with the two drill rigs and we'll have quite a bit of information flow, once the cores are pulled out and they start getting split and then sent to the lab, then we'll start some real data flow once we start seeing assays, but that's probably a good six to eight weeks away before we start seeing those sort of things.

Gerardo Del Real: Great time to have 100% ownership of a potential emerging lithium, not deposit, but district. Anything to add to that, Blair?

Blair Way: Absolutely. We've been working away for some time on this project. We've been working with our option agreement and managed to find a solution where we could get a hundred percent ownership. We've acquired a bunch of other ground that connected some of the ground we already had. And that's as I've said before, we've now got a 50 kilometer trend of the Greenstone Belt with the pegmatites that are bearing the spodumene crystals that we're seeking out for the lithium. We've got so much ground in front of us here, and the opportunity to build this, in this new district, which we now call it officially the Corvette property. And we've got a ton of work to do there. We've got a ton of prospectivity and we've got the war chest to do the work. Well, really the next eight months is going to be a really exciting time as we continue to prove up this property.

Gerardo Del Real: Exciting times. Thanks for that update, Blair. Look forward to the results.

Blair Way: Thanks, Gerardo. It's great to catch up. I'll certainly be looking forward to chatting to you again.

Gerardo Del Real: Me as well. Chat soon.

Blair Way: Bye.

Click here to see more from Patriot Battery Metals Inc.