Categories: Base Metals
Topics: General Base Metals

T2 Metals (TSX-V: TWO)(OTCQB: AGLAF) CEO Mark Saxon on Drilling for a Copper Discovery in the Lida Valley

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president and CEO of T2 Metals, Mr. Mark Saxon. Mark, great to have you on. How are you today?

Mark Saxon: Gerardo, great to chat again and, yeah, been too long. Doing really well out here in Australia. Looking forward to Christmas, I can say. So yeah, things are on the right track.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, I know you're in Australia right now, but there's a lot to be thankful for in Nevada. Drilling has commenced at a project, a copper silver project that I really, really like. I would love for you to provide a bit of context on the target there. I know how methodical and diligent you and your team are about developing targets and I also know that you spend a lot of your time vetting properties and do not lend your time easily to just any project for news sake. So tell me a bit about what led you to like this project and the target that you're chasing right now.

Mark Saxon: Yeah, super. So yeah, lots of parts to unpack in that question and, yeah, we'll go through that sort of in a nice sequence. So the project is the Lida, L-I-D-A, project in Nevada, so it's about an hour to the north of the town of Beatty, which is a really active mining center, and I guess, yeah, about 50 kilometers from the California border or perhaps a little bit more. So in a really active mining district. In every direction around us there’s lots going on. We're not far from the town of Goldfield as well, which is another very active mining center.

So we identified this project in, as you say, quite methodical project generation or regional search I suppose, trying to prioritize different things that we had been offered or things that we had identified ourselves and so we came into Lida as a brand new project. It had no history of drilling, it was unclaimed, we own 100% because we did the claiming, the staking, ourselves with our own team. And in fact we've been progressively increasing our land holding there with additional staking as we got more information. So yeah, I guess that shows our feeling for the project.

We went in and we did some first early stage sampling and we found lots and lots of copper oxide at surface and, yeah, obviously a great indication, but copper oxide's pretty easy to find. It's got that green color and so it's easy to take high grade samples when you're chasing copper. But we got great grades of copper, but we also got some very good grades of silver as well, up to about 430 parts per million grams per tonne is the numbers we found. And so that kind of tells you that, "Okay, yes, this is something real."

We had a look at the geological context and we saw that there's quite a few carbonate sequences in the region, but we're on a trend as well that's got some buried and potential for porphyrys. So we saw, "Okay, if there's a buried porphyry on this target, how do we identify it?" And the best way there is geophysics. Went back in and we ran an IP survey in the middle of 2022, so about six months ago, and that identified a really strong, and let's call it right sized, ore body sized, IP anomaly that sits below the area of surface copper mineralization.

And that gave us the indication that, "All right, there's something here that, yeah, first of all, we don't know what it is.” It doesn't come to surface. We can't explain it from what we're seeing at surface. Second of all, it's associated with copper mineralization at surface. It's on a great trend. The Walker Lane in Nevada that is a place known to host similar systems. The only thing next to do is drill. And yeah, we've achieved that point now.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, that's the point that we non-geologists get excited about, right? I know on your end of it, the team's end of it, it's really exciting to go through the process of vetting these targets. But for us non-geos, that's all fine and dandy, but again, it's the rubber hitting the road and really finding out what's underneath and what the source of the anomalies is, right?

And so let me ask you a little bit about that and get you to talk a bit about that. The top of the anomaly you describe in the press release is interpreted to lie at around 250 meters vertical depth. How long will it take you to actually reach that 250 meter target?

Mark Saxon: So the anomaly, and we're talking here about an IP chargeability anomaly, and, yeah, to sort of digress a little bit, the chargeability is a measurement typically of sulfide in the ground. And so when the IP system puts a little bit of electrical current in the ground, and if you've got sulfur bearing minerals, then they will carry that charge and that's what we're measuring.

And so when you think of sulfide minerals, you're thinking of all the minerals that host metallic deposits are generally associated with sulfides. And so yeah, we can see this anomaly, we can see this chargeable feature that sits... Yeah, the top is at about 200 meters vertical depth. So yeah, it's something that we know is most likely to be a sulfide bearing body.

So we've got a group, their local base is out of Beatty, Timberline Drilling on site at the moment. They're drilling double shift, they're drilling really well. They've been on site for, yeah, five or six days now including their set up and getting their gear on site. So we're a number of days away from sort of hitting the top of that target now and, yeah, so that's the real time where, yeah, we know what is in the ground causing that chargeability anomaly. So it's incredibly exciting as a geologist just to be the first to drill, to put a hole into a target is, yeah, the greatest joy of all, I guess, in what we do in explorations.

Gerardo Del Real: And again, just to be absolutely clear, you haven't discovered anything in the exploration records in the field that either of the three IP targets have been previously drill tested, correct?

Mark Saxon: Yeah, exactly. Nothing at all. Yeah, we've had guys in the field there regularly and with drill holes you can always see something that... Yeah, there's either a track built or you can see, yeah, sometimes even a hole or a drill collar or sometimes what we'd call the spoils that came out of the hole. Yeah, we can't see any of that that has tested these IP anomalies.

So it's a brand new target in a great part of Nevada, sitting on the trend of major ore bodies. So yeah, it ticks many boxes and I've got to say Nevada has been such an easy state for us to work in. We're sitting on BLM land, so federal land, and the ability to get permitted and move quickly really has been remarkable. So yeah, these projects, you identify them, put in some good science, do the early work, and really can move to drilling extremely quickly.

Gerardo Del Real: Exciting times, discoveries in the market despite what is overall a challenging environment for a lot of companies – discoveries of significance have been really rewarded. I couldn't be more excited about the fundamentals in the midterm for copper. And so look, I think there's real potential here to take the company from a market cap that's minuscule. Where's the market cap right now, Mark?

Mark Saxon: Seven or eight million Canadian, something like that. So yeah, five million US. So yeah, we're at early days, that's for sure.

Gerardo Del Real: Yeah, a copper silver discovery of significance would rerate that many, many times over. That's what everybody writes a check for, that's what everybody buys stock for. Congrats again to you and the team on developing such a compelling set of targets and can't wait to see the assay results once those come back.

Mark Saxon: Thanks, Gerado. And yeah, we'll keep everyone updated as we get close to the target, so it's exciting times.

Gerardo Del Real: Appreciate it. Good luck out there.

Mark Saxon: Thanks, Gerardo. All right, chat soon.