Categories: Energy
Topics: Lithium Stocks

Q2 Metals (TSX-V: QTWO)(OTC: QUEXF) VP Exploration Neil McCallum on Building Lithium Resources Via the Drill-Bit at Flagship Cisco Lithium Project, Quebec, with Summer Drilling Right Around the Corner

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the VP of Exploration for Q2 Metals (TSX-V: QTWO)(OTC: QUEXF) — Mr. Neil McCallum. Neil, it’s great to have you back on. How are you today?

Neil McCallum: I'm doing fantastic, thanks. Just finished today out at the project as we kick off our summer program.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, let's get right into it. Collectively, the three intervals in Hole-27, which you just reported on today, you reported four drill holes from the 2025 winter program, but hole 27 collectively — again, I want to be careful with the context here — adds up to being the best hole of the Cisco project in terms of grade multiplied by width.

The grades were fantastic. The three major intervals include:

• 179.6 meters of 1.66% lithium
• 58 meters of 1.75%
• 91.8 meters at 1.81%
   

Obviously, a successful start to the reporting of assays. We have 10 drill holes pending. Talk to me about these four holes and what you learned from them.

Neil McCallum:  Yes, these were expected in some regard in terms of being that southern continuation of the drilling analytical and the zone that we've defined already. Hole 27 we knew was going to be good because the series of wider intervals that we've reported all seem to be consistently on the higher grade of things, which is a great combination to have those wide intervals and the higher grades.

That was not a surprise that it was high but I wasn’t quite expecting that much, and I’m quite pleased by it — so very good there. There are a few holes that were to the east of the program, touching on the deeper intercepts of the stuff that we had defined last year and just adding to the picture a little bit more. 

All in all, positive and we’re looking forward to getting more analytical from the lab, and we'll report those as soon as we get them as well.

Gerardo Del Real: Tell me about the positioning of the 10 holes that are pending  because as you mentioned when you first kicked off this program that it was a multi-pronged approach. You had some pretty aggressive step-outs but you’re also trying to learn more about the orientation of some of these trends.

Can you speak to the 10 holes that are remaining and what we can learn from those once we get the assays in?

Neil McCallum: Yes, I’d summarize those as three of them continuing further to the south. And I think there’s some sort of complexity that we haven’t quite understood further south of that 1 km strike length that we’ve defined. It’s going to take a few more holes to figure that out.

Sometimes these pegmatites can throw surprises at you, and it’s just a matter of adding more holes and getting the understanding. And that’s not all that surprising to me that it was a little bit unpredictable.

So that’s three holes and a few more in the main part of the zone where we’ve already done some drilling. It’s really going to be important to understand; instead of interpreting how these things are oriented, we can do some infill drilling to understand exactly the way that these pegmatites are dipping.

That’s really going to help us have an understanding of just how much drilling we’re going to need to do to bring this to resource. Because what we’ve done so far is really large step-outs, and it’s too widely spaced right now to do that resource-scale knowledge. We’ve got some work ahead of us, and that’s going to help us know exactly what we need to do.

And some of that additional drilling was a few holes at another outcrop further to the east — we call it CO2 — and there are some surprises there too but it’s open-ended. We’re going to be testing that this summer too just to fully understand that area.

There’s more good news to come — and we’ll be certain after summer exactly where we left off, which was one of those holes in the main zone. We’re going to be off to the races in a few weeks here.

Gerardo Del Real:  Exciting stuff. I know the stock obviously has sold off pretty substantially here over the past month especially; it’s accelerated. Overall, the lithium space continues to be weak. You and I chatted off-air that it’s just a matter of when, not a matter of if — and so I expect the turn to be violent when it happens.

When it happens is anyone’s guess. That’s the collective market, right? That’s the overall market. But as far as Q2 Metals goes, you’re funded and you clearly want to continue to define the orientation of the way these deposits sit. 

How aggressive will you be in the summer drill campaign?

Neil McCallum: I don’t think we’re going to be quite as aggressive just with, like you said, some of those overall market variables. What we’ve broadly defined, we can’t call it a deposit… but the zone that we’ve defined is turning out to be quite large.

I know there’s been people that have put out their speculative broad strokes on what they think it could be — so I don’t need to do all that much more step-out. It doesn’t need to be enormous.

When you put a mine plan together, you’re not typically putting all of what you define for a project at this scale. I think we’re going to be leaning towards defining something that’s a little more manageable to define and something a little bit more closer to surface and something that we can eventually put a mine plan around as that’s ultimately the goal.

We don’t need to define endless resources. That’s great, and it sounds great on paper. But realistically, we don’t need to do that. It’s going to be a balanced approach of understanding and doing that intel work that needs to get done.

Gerardo Del Real:  Naturally, you want to take care of the treasury and you want to be intelligent and methodical in how you go about defining this — and size for size’s sake — we know it’s big, we know it’s huge, we know it’s rich, and we know the infrastructure is top-notch.

So let’s finally start putting a clearer picture out to the market so that it understands exactly how robust this is.

Neil McCallum: Exactly. 

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Neil, thank you for coming on. Looking forward to those other 10 holes — and looking forward to having you back on. Appreciate it.

Neil McCallum: Yes, of course, anytime.

Gerardo Del Real:  Cheers.