Categories: Energy
Topics: Lithium Stocks

Q2 Metals (TSX-V: QTWO)(OTC: QUEXF) VP Exploration Neil McCallum on Extending Strike Length at Flagship Cisco Lithium Project in James Bay, Quebec, to 1.5 Kilometers Ahead of Summer Drilling

 

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

Neil McCallum: I'm doing great, thanks, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Listen, an important day for Canada, a very turbulent time geopolitically around the world, and markets that are a little spooky. Let's be completely frank.

You put out some news today extending the mineralized zone strike length at Cisco to 1.5 km and put out some really good hits with, obviously, some holes that missed. But overall, the release, the way I read it, has a whole heck of a lot of tonnage to the project. 

You are still in position to have one of the biggest projects here in North America. And yet, the market has decided to use that as a liquidity event. Can you break down the results? 

I mean, Hole 28 had eight different spodumene pegmatite intervals, the widest being 50.9 meters. But you also had a noteworthy one, as you mentioned in the release, of 21.5 meters and 19.3 meters. I could continue on with Hole 36 and add up the 64.3 meters and the 22.3 meters and the 18.1 meters and the 12.7 meters in one hole. 

Those seem like phenomenal results to me. Give me the context… you're the pro out there.

Neil McCallum: For sure, and I think we may have built some expectations that, going forward, we would continue to find continuous mineralized zones that are 200 and 300 meters and greater. And look, those didn't disappear. We were just testing along strike to the south and to the north and also to the east. Part of what we’re doing in this winter campaign was looking for where this thing ends or tapers off.

One thing to keep in mind at the south end of our project is that we are trying to balance that goal of doing as much as we can to extend the mineralization without doing too much drilling. Ideally, I'd like to have three or four or more drill holes per section line. But given the timing, given the budget we had, we were only able to do two and sometimes only one hole per section line.

So to think that we could get into the zone on 200-meter step-outs was maybe a little bit aggressive. But it's leaving a lot of room for us to continue to work and build on the results, especially all of the way to the south where those holes, oftentimes, if you add up those mineralized intervals, they’re over 50 meters. And some of those you mentioned are over 100 meters. 

I think you'd be glad to have any of those results anywhere else in Canada. I'm not looking at this as a disappointment at all. I'm actually excited.

Gerardo Del Real: And you benefit, let's be clear, from phenomenal infrastructure. I think you're going to continue to benefit from James Bay becoming a very prominent player in the battery metals space. And look, the lithium market is soft. And markets in general, with the exception of gold, are pretty soft right now. 

But we're not drilling this thing out. I need to remind folks that I don't own shares for what's going to happen in 2025. I love the value that's being added. Whether the market recognizes it or not, I'm holding this like I'm holding Patriot Battery Metals for that turnaround within the next 12 to 24 months where everything gets re-rated and where the work has been done.

Neil McCallum: Yes, and there’s more room to step out in several directions and find some of the boundaries. Then, it's going to be that laborious job of doing the infill drilling, more of a grid-spaced drilling, in the center of the deposit to actually define what we have. 

That's going to take a pretty intense amount of capital, and we're just timing things for when we get those funds in to do that work. That'll also be a time when we're putting out great results, again, in those wide zones that we had drilled before filling in the gaps; that's going to be great.

What we've done in this most recent campaign is we’ve stepped out to test the boundaries. It's going to continue to be a great project, and we just have to do the work to prove it up.

Gerardo Del Real: What comes next in regard to getting back to it in June? You're taking a small break, processing the data; it's goose-hunting season. What comes next?

Neil McCallum: We have a lot of planning ahead of us for our summer program. It's all ready to go in terms of logistics. But it's finding, again, that balance between extending the zones that we have already and finding the boundaries of this project.

One thing to keep note of that I'm really excited about is that we've really only tested a tiny portion of the entire project; boots on the ground coverage of only around 10% to 15% of the actual project with our exploration team. We have about 30 km of strike length, and the Cisco Zone is kind of in the middle of that. 

There's a lot more work to do to test some interesting potential outcrop areas of pegmatite all along that trend. That's work we have planned for the beginning of the summer. It's not going to distract us from the drilling but we realize there could be a whole other thing along strike. 

It's not going to take any of our energy away from what we have already because we realize that what we have is amazing. But a few more mineralized zones along the trend could really add some value as well. 

Gerardo Del Real: To be absolutely clear, there will still be more exploration drilling, right?

Neil McCallum: Definitely. We are going to be filling in some of the gaps, especially to the south end of the project. We're going to continue to unravel what's happening at the CO2 outcrop; a giant outcrop area that's well-mineralized. We’re coming at it from the south and from the north. Eventually, we're going to find the subsurface expression there.

We’re also going to be doing some infill holes to gain a better understanding of what we're going to need to do in the future on the spacing we’ll need to get to that Indicated & Inferred level of the main zone that we've already found so far. There's a lot more to be uncovered around the boundaries of this project, and that's exactly what we're going to do this summer.

Gerardo Del Real: Beautiful. Good work as always. Chat again soon. Thank you for your time, Neil.

Neil McCallum: Yep, you bet, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Alright, bye now.

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