Sonia Madigan:
We’re coming to you from the floor at Kalgoorlie Diggers & Dealers 2023, and I’m with Patriot Battery Metals (PMT) CEO Blair Way.
Now, Blair, you had a production update that came out just a week ago.
Blair Way:
Yes, that’s correct. We just released our maiden resource, 109 million tonnes at 1.42 per cent. So the market’s pretty excited about it. Certainly, it was something we were very pleased with. And then the day after that, we announced a strategic investment.
Sonia Madigan:
Now tell us about that, that investment. Was that involving Albemarle?
Blair Way:
That’s correct, so we brought Albemarle in as a strategic investor for 4.9 per cent and we’re working together to solve some of the downstream challenges for a resource of our size. We need to have chemical conversion downstream.
Sonia Madigan:
Now this is your second Diggers & Dealers, how are you finding it and the response
to these Battery Metals?
Blair Way:
It’s incredible, Diggers & Dealers is always a great time. This is my second one, I have lost my voice about the same time as I did last year, so you get that, but a lot of talking, a lot of interest, Battery Metals has just gone ballistic.
Every one of these conferences we go to, we see the level of interest, both with the retail investors, institutional investors, and even other companies looking at how we can work together and collaborate.
And the lithium space is a pretty friendly space – companies all seem to get along pretty well and we’re not really competing because the demand is just incredible so we all have to succeed in order to solve these really long-term problems with the greenhouse gas emissions so it’s fantastic.
Sonia Madigan:
Now of course you’re based in Australia and you’re listed on the ASX but you’re also listed on the TSX, does that mean your main project is in Canada?
Blair Way:
That’s correct, we’re TSX Venture listed and ASX so we’re dual listed.
Our project is the Corvette project in northern Quebec, James Bay region.
So Quebec’s a very mining-friendly province, probably even similar to what we have here in WA. So we see some similarities and now we’re demonstrating some geological similarities with a lithium project like we’ve discovered with the Corvette.
Sonia Madigan:
We’ve certainly talked about a resource of scale. What does it take now to get to the point of being able to produce that lithium?
Blair Way:
So we’ve done our first resource we’re now going down that whole study process we’re doing a PFS we’re de-risking the project further with our permitting commencing the permitting process – baseline environmental monitoring we’ve already been doing that for some time gathering that data to feed into an EIS and ideally we’re targeting through our permitting completion by 2027 with construction and commissioning in 2028.
So it’s a big aggressive pathway we have ahead of us but we’ll continue to not only move this first resource forward but we have another 45 kilometres of strike to drill so we have a tonne of drilling ahead of us to demonstrate the scale of what we have in our Corvette project is similar to what we see here in Western Australia.
Sonia Madigan:
Well, lots of work ahead then. Blair Way from Patriot Battery Metals, thanks for taking the time to speak with us.