Categories: Base Metals / Precious Metals
Topics: General Base Metals / General Precious Metals

T2 Metals (TSX-V: TWO)(OTC: AGLAF) CEO Mark Saxon on Receiving Exciting Results from First Two Holes of Drilling at Flagship Lida Copper, Silver, Gold Porphyry Project, Nevada

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president & CEO of T2 Metals — Mr. Mark Saxon. Mark, I've known you for quite a bit now, well over a decade, and I know you are not the type of CEO that gets excited easily. So when I read the recent release… and let me read the headline really quick. It says: 

T2 Metals Intersects Intense Alteration and Porphyritic Dyke in Drilling at the Lida Copper-Silver-Gold Project in Nevada.

When I read the quote, I said, ‘Mark sounds excited!’ And so I'm glad to have you on because I want you to explain — and correct me if I'm wrong if you're not excited — but it sounds like you're really liking what you saw in this initial drilling in the initial two holes. 

And obviously, we're waiting to get the numbers on it but at least, rock-wise, it sounds like you're happy with what you got.

Mark Saxon: Hey, Gerardo, and thank you very much for the chance to talk it through. And you're making me sound very old by saying we've known each other for 10 years! We’re very, very pleased to share the results of Lida here. 

And, really, the fun part of exploration and geology in mining, one of the very best parts, is putting in those first holes into new projects where you've really literally never seen the rocks before. And Lida is one of those projects that we generated as a first-concept idea. We did some field work, we did some geophysics, and then we started drilling. And so we're now seeing the fruits of those labors, I suppose.

So, absolutely, there's always unexpected things. And this is one of those holes where we drilled and we said, ‘What's that?’ — which we can touch on a little bit further in — but where we're seeing a porphyritic dyke where a porphyry dyke was near the top of the hole and went through some sediments that have the vein style and the alteration style that looks like a distal signature to a porphyry. 

We then drilled into this, let's call it, a funny white rock at the bottom, which was a little bit unexpected and has formed a target in itself. So yeah, it's the way drilling works… you see lots of new and exciting things!

Gerardo Del Real: Tell me a bit about what the target was. And, again, we're waiting on results; we're waiting on actual numbers. But tell me what the target was and how you're perceiving it now. And, I should say, now it's ‘targets,’ right?

Mark Saxon: Yeah, and it's a big project. We have multi-kilometers of anomalies in this area, and it's a project that's never been drilled before. The project sits on a regional trend that's called the Walker Lane in Nevada — close to the California border — and well-known for world-class copper deposits. It's well-known for world-class gold and for silver deposits as well in that area. 

Beatty, where we based ourselves out of, is a real hub for exploration mining, as is Goldfield, which is the next little town to the north. It's a really well-known district. And we saw this area where it had a lot of copper mineralization at surface sitting in a sandstone, and we thought: 

‘That's funny. It's not a normal host for copper. What can we think about in terms of a target style that could underlie that and be the ore body that underlies the smoke at the top?’

So our model that we preferred on that target was a porphyry; a porphyry essentially being a ball-shaped or balloon-shaped intrusion that pushes up through the rock and carries all of the copper. And then, when it cools and fractures, the copper releases into the wall rock and into the sandstone around it. 

And so what we've been seeing in the rocks is what we think is the effect of a porphyry intruding and then fracturing and altering the rocks around it as it comes in because you've got a really hot rock coming into cold rocks. 

And you can kind of see that in the signature in the rocks when you look at the drill core and you look at the rocks around it. So that's what I think we've been seeing in the rocks here in both drill holes.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. What comes next?

Mark Saxon: Yes, so we’ve drilled two holes. We had prepared pads for a few more. But I think on the basis of what we had seen and, in particular, the rock that we intersected in the bottom of the first hole told us that there are more things that we don't know than we do know — which is always a good thing. 

So we decided to hold the program at two holes, and we'll come back with some new thinking and probably some new geophysics to take us into a slightly new location from where we were drilling. But it's a big project with lots going on, and so we've got lots of opportunity there. 

Drilling sometime during the middle part of the year is the aim, and, really, they're walk-up drill targets now based on what we've seen already.

Gerardo Del Real: This is shaping up to be a very, very exciting exploration project. To have these types of rocks and this type of signature this early on in the first two holes on an untested property is exceptional. 

I would love for you to provide a brief overview of the rest of the portfolio for those that may be new to the T2 Metals story and are really liking this exploration story that's emerging. There's a lot more to T2 than just this project, though, obviously, the focus right now, in the immediate term, is on the results from these first two holes.

Mark Saxon: Absolutely. We're not a one-project company and we're building out a story and our basis. And you know the team I work with, Gerardo; we're very strong on project generation and always looking for those next projects. We're always filling that pipeline, which we're very active on at the moment.

In the portfolio at the moment, we've got a project in Arizona called Cora, which has got lots of great evidence of being a porphyry system. It's about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson right in the heart of the porphyry copper belt of Arizona — a great place to be with lots going on all around us. 

And then, our third project is in Manitoba, Canada, which is a resource-stage copper project. This one VHMS-style — volcanic-hosted massive sulfide — in the Flin Flon camp, which is a great mining district. And Manitoba is a super place to get work done quickly. In fact, we raised a bit of flow-through money in Canada to cover that project, and we'll be seeing some news flow from that coming through in the next 12 or so months. 

So I think we have a really good balance between jurisdiction risk and geology risk and commodity risk. I think we're in a great position for the coming year.

Gerardo Del Real: A lot to like for a company with a market cap of just over C$12 million. Looking forward to the assays. Looking forward to having you back on, Mark. Thanks so much for the time.

Mark Saxon: Thanks, Gerardo, and thank you for the support. Chat soon.