Categories: Energy
Topics: Lithium Stocks

Q2 Metals (TSX-V: QTWO)(OTC: QUEXF) VPE Neil McCallum on Inferred Mineral Resource Estimate on the Cisco Lithium Project with 295 Million Tonnes Grading 1.36% Li₂O

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me once again 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. Congratulations are in order. How are you today?

Neil McCallum: I'm good, thanks. Good.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, thank you for making time. I know your phone has got to be ringing off the hook. You just announced a few days back an inferred mineral resource estimate on Cisco, long awaited. And look, you all knocked it out of the park. 295 million tonnes, grading 1.36%. It should be noted that in addition to that, there's an exploration target that estimates 44 to 67 million tonnes.

And so again, congratulations. I would love to get your thoughts on how you and the team are feeling about, frankly, giving us a first peak that is one hell of a look.

Neil McCallum: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's like we kind of knew already because we had the exploration target based on basically just wider drill spacing. So what we did over the past year since then, that was about July last year for the exploration target, so the work during the summer and then the winter months led to confirming that initial pre-estimate, I guess you'd call it. You can't really call it a mineral resource estimate yet, but it was kind of like, "Hey, this is a range of what it could be," and we're in the upper range of the target with still some exploration target remaining right in the immediate area, which is basically the area of the resource, which doesn't yet have enough drill information. So the holes are just too far apart to be put into that inferred category yet.

So we've got a lot of work ahead this summer to quite easily put that into resource is the goal. And then beyond that, there's more work ahead as well.

Gerardo Del Real: It's important to note a couple of things. The first, I think the fact that the deposit area, it remains open in all directions. And this is a tiny portion of the project area, which has tons of blue sky exploration upside. Can you speak to that aspect of it?

Neil McCallum: Oh, for sure. So the project itself is about 20 kilometer wide swath of what we call the Frotet Evans Greenstone Belt. So these lithium deposits are often found on these greenstone belts, and we found one lithium deposit along there. And if you take examples of other projects, these greenstone belts often have more than one. They're often stringed along, spaced apart every maybe five kilometers on average.

So I would be very surprised if this were the only one. Obviously it's not going to be a huge distraction, but we'll look for more this summer, as we did last year. But our focus will be on this project just because it's obviously one of significance, but there is more blue sky potential. If you want to think about it as a pipeline of projects, this will be the first one, and heck, maybe there's more. So we'll see how that goes.

Gerardo Del Real: Yeah. I doubt you guys discovered the only one in this huge, huge land package, right?

Neil McCallum: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Gerardo Del Real: I would love for you to just touch on and provide some color and context on the geometry of the deposit because I know for the majors, oftentimes when they're looking at taking something out or owning something and developing it, size and grade obviously are important considerations for margins, but so is the way that the deposit is shaped.

Can you speak to the advantages that you have here as far as the actual deposit? And then we could touch a bit on the infrastructure advantage, which you did so well on the Bizarro World podcast when we had you on here a week or two ago, which is well-received, by the way. Thank you for that.

Neil McCallum: Yeah, of course. I guess what you're talking about, the geometry. So we've known that for a while with those continuous wide intervals of greater than a hundred meters of continuous pegmatite. And we've got up to 450 meters, which ranks as the widest continuous spodumene pegmatite interval in the world from a grade-times-width perspective. That entire 450 sum averaged to about 1.65. So that's great, and that leads to the beneficial geometry.

So not only do we have the continuous wide zone in the middle that tends to be higher grade, we also have nearby parallel veins along the trend, which lead to better economics. So it leads to what amounts to a lower strip ratio. I mean, we can't really put those into economic terms yet, so it'll be about roughly two and a half strip ratio for the open pit, and that is quite good compared to other projects. And once we get to the level of the PEA, that's when those kind of like geometries and strip ratios really will play us a huge favor in the economics, I expect.

Gerardo Del Real: Can we speak about the infrastructure advantage? Which, if you followed the project and the team and Q2 for any amount of time, we've all known it, but again, I think you're going to have a lot of new eyes to this story and a lot of new potential suitors in addition to the ones that you already had knocking at the door and wanting to peek through the window. Can you speak to that a bit?

Neil McCallum: Yeah, of course. So it's great to have a resource that's big. The economics are looking positive. We'll get to that, but it doesn't matter if your project is far away from road or other infrastructure. So within the James Bay region, which is looking like obviously a very world-class region, there's other more advanced projects than us, but we definitely win the prize for infrastructure.

So just being close to the railhead at Matagami, we're only about 150 kilometers away from that, whereas other projects are double that in some cases, and over 800 in other cases. So that trucking issue to get the concentrate to the rail, which then you can send it to the processing facilities underway in Becancour or even ship it elsewhere in the deep sea ports of the St. Lawrence. So that key advantage there will help us later on, again, in the economics of things, lowering those transport costs.

Gerardo Del Real: What comes next, right? That's always the million-dollar question that everybody always wants, "Hey, that's nice. 295 million tonnes, good on you, but what comes next, Neil?"

Neil McCallum: Yeah, of course. So we can always talk about infill drilling versus expansion drilling. I'd like to do a little bit of both. I think it is definitely warranted. We obviously don't need to drill for the sake of adding more tonnes to this. It's big enough, but the idea will be if we have targets that we can hit that are shallow, high-grade, more along strike is the issue, we could keep drilling, extending holes. Some of the drilling that we did last year, we had to end the hole in pegmatite at great depths because at a certain point it doesn't make sense to keep going at depth, but it's going to be finding more tonnes near surface. So that's a big key for us.

And then of course infill to get to the next level of confidence above inferred, which will of course de-risk the project and make a more precise PEA when we get those economics into the project too.

Gerardo Del Real: No, listen, exciting times for Q2, exciting times for shareholders. I'm really curious to see if you make it out of 2026. That's going to be fun to watch. Anything to add to that, Neil?

Neil McCallum: No, not at all. It's going to be a busy summer. Going forward, we're just going to keep building value, keep working on this, doing all the right things to lead to the next level of the project.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Thank you for your time. I know you're busy. I'll let you go. Hope to have you back on here soon.

Neil McCallum: Sounds great. Okay. Thanks, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Cheers. Thank you.

Click here to see more from Q2 Metals