Categories: Energy
Topics: Lithium Stocks

Patriot Battery Metals (TSX-V: PMET)(OTC: OMETF) CEO Blair Way on New Discovery at the Corvette Property w/ Intercepts 100 m of Spodumene-Bearing Pegmatite at CV9, Quebec, Canada

 

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, I know that you are traveling and are on the go, so I want to thank you for your time. How are you today? 

Blair Way: I'm good. I'm coming to you live from Quebec Mines and Energy Conference in Quebec City. So yeah, it's a busy time back on the road as seems to be a regular occurrence these days, which is all good.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, as a shareholder, I appreciate you out there marketing. I know the share price has been stuck in the road, but you've been doing some really, really good work and you just had some news that I think a lot of us that were excited about CV9 have been waiting for. You made a new discovery at the Corvette property. You intercepted a hundred meters of spodumene bearing pegmatite at CV9. More importantly, and I want to touch it on the fact that there's a part that thickens to at least 80 meters width, remains open in multiple directions, so I want to get into all of that. Can you provide the context for the news?

Blair Way: Absolutely. CV9, as we've spoken about many times, we've got CV9, we've got CV10, we've got CV8, we've got 12, we've got 13, and we had CV5. CV5 grew from CV5 and CV6 and CV1 to become what's now known as CV5. We've been drilling CV13. The market was always a little bit confused about it being another discovery. It was only four or five Ks away, I guess from CV5, but this one is 14 Ks away from CV5. It is a new area on the same greenstone belt that CV5 is on in our Corvette property.

But yeah, it's something that we're very, very pleased with. It took us a little while to sort of tease out what was going on. We've drilled, I think it's 4,000 odd meters or approximately 4,000 meters and 18 holes. It's great to be able to have the resources to be able to drill these things properly because you can put a couple holes down and it's not clear. You want to be able to have that resource and look, we believe we found something special here and it's going to need more work, but we're very happy with what we've found. And as you said, it's open in multiple directions, which is fantastic. It's something quite spectacular yet again.

Gerardo Del Real: We're of course waiting for assays. It's been pretty predictable for the most part, right? But anytime you hit a hundred meters of near continuous spodumene bearing, that type of hit on the final hole of the program, I think speaks to Darren and the exploration team developing a quick understanding, relatively quick understanding of what's going on at CV9. Are you excited for that part of it?

Blair Way: For sure. I mean, it is quick, although I think sometimes the average or the average watcher of Patriot thinks it's not fast enough, but it does take time to drill these holes and to understand what they're telling us and make the proper interpretations to be able to tease it out. It's not like we have a lot of remote sensing in order for us to determine where it may or may not be going. So you actually do have to put the time in and we drill the holes, we pull the core out, the core gets logged, gets interpreted, gets fed into a model, and you got to tweak it. And so the guys have done, Darren, his team have done a great job at interpreting this stuff and figuring out what's going on there. And we found something of significance and now we're going to have to continue to drill.

The drilling has stopped for the fall. The rigs have… well, they've stopped drilling in the last couple of days, now the geos have got to get full on getting caught up on core. We have a backlog of cores because as you know, we'd rather use the beds for the drillers than the geos right now because the geos can get caught up. And that's where we're really where we are right now. And that that's going to be the next sort of task, get all these cores and obviously we prioritize some over others to get them to the lab to get the results as soon as we can. But the reality is we're going to have assays coming in from earlier in the program, but we're going to have assays rolling well into Q2 next year with the amount of core that we have yet to log, and then we're going to be back drilling again in January with our 10 rig program anyway, so it's a busy time.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. I know you're on the road. I know you're on the run, so I'm going to try to wrap up. I want to do a couple of things I want to ask you about Albemarle and how that's coming along, and I know we're getting closer to having a more public idea on what that relationship could look like if it advances and if it does advance, then what the plan will be as far as initial permitting vision. How is that going?

Blair Way: Albemarle is a great company work with. We've been working through the various aspects of understanding how Corvette might be able to feed a future hydroxide plant, and obviously this sort of work that we're doing still remains under a level of confidentiality, but they've been great to work with. They certainly are very, very keen and interested in the Corvette property as we are with their capabilities, and we're just working towards that culmination of discussing what a relationship might look like down the track. And we've got, I think... The nine-month term as it is takes us to May I think is the date. So we've still got a bit of time to be working away on this stuff, but so far so good, and certainly the level of teamwork and cooperation has been fantastic.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. The last thing that I want to do is I want to encourage the couple of places where I go to see the chatter from time to time, and it is time to time because if you go daily, sometimes it can get comical again.

Blair Way: Yeah.

Gerardo Del Real: I understand the frustration as a shareholder, and I've been very frank with you, Blair, about the fact that I still would love to see a spin out and I would still love the de-listing. I know that there's various differing opinions on that for different reasons. I'm respectful of all of it, but I do want to encourage over the next several days, and I'll put something on Twitter, but the ceo.ca community has done a good job when they stick to factual questions about posting questions that have real merit. And so over the next couple of days, guys and gals post away, I'll take the ones that I think are the most relevant that can be chatted about publicly and maybe you and I, Blair could sit down for 20 or 30 minutes as we did couple of releases ago and just kind of go through it one by one.

I know personally I want to talk about the lake. I want to talk about some of the other things that have gone on. I want to talk about potential plans as much as you can, and then open it up, Mr. Koala or Ms. Koala, whenever you post something, it tends to be insightful. I'm more than happy to entertain questions on the Twitter side of things as well. And again, on ceo.ca, a lot of you do a really good job of posting questions that I think have merit and are important for shareholders, especially if you bought in higher prices to understand. Right?

Blair Way: That sounds like a good plan, Gerardo, and I'm obviously in the time zones that make it easier for us to have a longer more meaningful call, so let's take advantage over that. All of that over the next few days and yeah, gather some questions. Hopefully they'll be sensible and let's keep it sensible. There's always lots of emotion when the markets are kind of crappy as they are right now, but there's some real good fundamentals that still remain that I think we can stay focused on and how to continue to build value and de-risk the project and be ready as the market starts to turn. And we think it's all indicators are that we're going to see that turn. I'd like to think it's before Christmas, but I don't have that crystal ball, but certainly some of the experts in the space such as value and spodumene pricing and all that sort of stuff. And consumption of inventories in China indicate that we should see the turn, and I'm looking forward to it for sure.

Gerardo Del Real: I think that turn's going to coincide with those warrants getting exercised, and I think the timing on that's going to be really good going into 2024 with the bulk of assays that we're expecting and the resumption of drilling with 10 rigs come January. Blair, I'll let you run. Thanks again for your time.

Blair Way: Thanks, Gerardo. Great to catch up and we'll talk later this week.

Gerardo Del Real: Cheers.

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