Blair Way's
Patriot Battery Metals Inc. (
PMET) fell 15 cents to $9.99 on 144,000 shares. The company has drilled a 56.6-metre interval grading 1.37 per cent lithium oxide in the latest assays from its Corvette project in the James Bay district of Quebec. The headline hit came from the CV5 pegmatite, but Patriot has also done well drilling at the CV13 body, where recent drilling has extended the still-open pegmatite to 1,100 metres along strike.
CV5 is still the granddaddy, with a 4.35-kilometre strike delineated on a pegmatite that also remains open at both ends. Meanwhile, assays are pending from CV9, and Patriot cheers several other pegmatites as needing to be drilled, including CV4, CV8, CV10 and CV12. And yes, for those who have surmised it from the unimaginative naming system, there are at least 13 pegmatites at Corvette.
And so, Mr. Way, president and CEO, was predictably pleased. "It is hard to understate the success of the 2023 drill campaign," he enthused -- although he of course made no attempt to do so. Mr. Way points to the recently completed summer and fall drilling and to the maiden mineral resource estimate produced earlier this year as work that "established CV5 as a world-class deposit and one of the largest lithium pegmatites globally." He also purrs approvingly about the other CV pegmatites, noting that the -- yes, again -- "world-class scale" of the Corvette system is poised for continued growth over the next few months as the assays continue to arrive.
For now, investors will have to base their regulatory-compliant enthusiasm on just CV5, where Mr. Way and his crew have an inferred resource of 109.2 million tonnes grading 1.42 per cent lithium oxide and 160 parts per million tantalum oxide. That calculation will undoubtedly grow with the subsequent drilling, and maiden calculations may start appearing at the other pegmatites next year. Patriot's stock is taking a breather for now, having leapt as high as $17.80 this year, up from 20 cents in 2021.