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

Power Metallic Mines (TSX-V: PNPN)(OTC: PNPNF) CEO Terry Lynch on Advancing the District-Scale High-Grade Polymetallic Nisk Discovery in Quebec via the Drill-Bit in a Booming Metals Market

 

Gerardo Del Real: I’m Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest, along with my friend, colleague, and business partner, Mr. Nick Hodge. Joining us today is a very special guest for an overdue catch-up — the CEO of Power Metallic Mines Inc. (TSX-V: PNPN)(OTC: PNPNF) — Mr. Terry Lynch. 

Terry, it’s been a bit. We have ourselves a heck of a market. How are you, sir?

Terry Lynch: It’s great to see you guys. Yes, it’s been too long for sure, so it’s good to catch up. And yes, I’ve been good. Obviously, listen, if you’re a miner and you’re not smiling, something’s wrong with you, right? It’s been a long time. You guys have been here forever, like we have, and it finally feels like we’re heading into some sunny, sunny days for us. We’re all excited about that.

Gerardo Del Real: Listen, I recall when this was just an exploration dream and the stock was trading at 10 or 15 cents. We had a bear market, and we were pounding the table about being a contrarian and getting ahead of the market — and getting ahead of the catalyst. 

And as well as the stock has done, and as much as you’ve accomplished — and we’ll get into that in a second here — it’s not lost on me that there are going to be a lot of new eyeballs and new investors coming into the metals space who are going to be looking at Power Metallic and asking, “Why do they have the shareholder registry that they have? Why are they being backed by some of the bigger names in the space?”

So, for people who may be new to the story, can you explain why this is such an important moment and year for Power Metallic Mines and, really, the problem Power Metallic is trying to help solve?

Terry Lynch: Yes, in mining, as you know, it’s all about what you find in the ground, right? You can do all the arm-waving in the world, and that’ll get you a little moment in time. If you’ve got some track record and some friends, that’ll buy you a little bit more. But at the end of the day, the rubber hits the road when the drill bit hits the dirt.

So we found something special — that’s the bottom line. And when you find something special in this space, you attract followers and people who know what they’re doing. We were lucky. We bought a decent project back five or six years ago. Obviously, it was a nickel project at the time. 

We drilled it up and found a bunch more nickel. And then, in hoping to find more nickel, we stepped out and drilled an area we thought was prospective for nickel — but it turned out we hit a home run and found crazy high grades of copper and precious metals.

So it’s just luck — God’s blessings. Okay, thank you. Let’s be honest. We drilled it for the right reasons, but the big guy cut us some slack and gave us some tremendous rocks to work with. That changed our thinking about what we had. It turned out we had this very special deposit type called an orthomagmatic nickel-copper PGE deposit. There have only been about 20 of them in the history of the world, and they’re literally the world’s greatest mines.

So when you get fortune like that, obviously you’ll attract great investors who understand what you have. We were lucky enough to attract Robert Friedman as our primary backer in the last two rounds. Rob McEwen has been in for three rounds. Gina Rinehart bought in the market. And we’ve been blessed with some really, really phenomenal mining investors who could see what we had, got in early, supported us, and gave us the capital to continue moving forward and developing this discovery.

That’s sort of been the background. And it’s funny you mention the space now attracting more and more investors. I was in New York four weeks ago, and I met the biggest whale of my life. And obviously, with guys like Friedman and McEwen and Sprott and others, I’ve met some rich folks. 

This guy is probably worth a hundred billion — unbelievable. I think he’s in Cobalt, one of the tech guys out in Silicon Valley. He’s a tech guy, but he set up his own brand-new billion-dollar fund. And that kind of stuff is happening now.

You’re meeting guys who couldn’t even spell mining — in jest — who had no interest in it. And now, all of a sudden, because of AI, electrification, critical minerals, and strategic control, mining has become a raging hot word for everyone. You’re getting a lot of new money coming into the space. A lot of multi-strategy funds that previously wouldn’t have touched mining are now not only stepping into deals, but taking entire packages.

So it’s a different environment, and we welcome it. We’ve been on the outcast heap for a long time, so we’re looking forward to being one of the favorite kids in the class for a while.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, if they can’t spell mining, I don’t know how they’d be able to spell polymetallic orthomagmatics. So tell me — what’s different about your polymetallic discovery? I see some of the companies you’re comparing yourself to in the slide deck, 4N and Chalice Mining. Now tell us truly why Power Metallic is different and what a polymetallic system really is.

Terry Lynch: Yes. So polymetallic just simply means multiple minerals, right? So in our case, we’re about 45% copper and 55% precious metals. The precious metals we have are platinum, palladium, gold, and silver. So we’re about 20%, 20%, 10%, 10%.

So the big difference between us and some of our peers would be the grade, right? What we’re really mostly well known for is our extremely high grade. Analysts are saying roughly somewhere between eight to 13 million tons — pick a number — between five to 7% copper equivalent. That was based on our old extraction numbers, which we’ll talk about in a second.

If you look at 4N, which is obviously a sensational discovery project in Saskatchewan with, I think, a roughly $3 billion market cap now, it’s about 25 million tons at 2.5%. So our whole way of thinking is that when you compare other polymetallics like 4N or Chalice, etc., you’ll find we compare very favorably in terms of metal in the ground.

If you sort of multiply our percentage by our tonnage, you’re going to get to some pretty healthy numbers of contained metal units. And obviously, as a miner, you want to process less rock if you can, because it means more profitability. With us, because it’s such high grade, we’ll be processing a lot less rock.

I think it’s funny — and I’ve said this before — we’ve had holes where we hit 32 meters of 7%, and it was about 110 meters from surface where we hit that 32 meters. I said to the guys, “I think we should actually say this is 120 meters of 2%,” which we could have done the math on, because that actually is accurate. But it would have made a bigger headline, because people can’t do the math.

They see 7% over 32 meters and think there’s a decimal place misplaced. Honest to God, I think that’s been part of the challenge — the grades have been so crazy for us that people are almost a little bit unbelieving. But obviously, the more we continue to put the numbers out there and back them up with metallurgical results, at some point they’ll have to accept that it really is that rich.

Gerardo Del Real: We talked about being early to this and getting the story out to the audience when it was just an early-stage exploration story. Again, for those who may be new to the space, can you walk us through the Lion Zone discovery and how that was made?

Terry Lynch: Yes. So, of course, we bought the historic Nisk discovery, which was nickel — about 3.1 million tons at 1.5%. We bought that, I think we closed in March of ’21, and then we started drilling it. About two years later, we were coming to the end of our winter season. The average hole at Nisk was about 400 meters, and we had moved it from three million tons to around seven in the MRE — maybe it’s about eight and a half now.

We basically had a couple of holes that had gone long and run into grade, and the geologist said, “Terry, we only have 200 meters left. Do you want to throw some more cash in and drill another hole?” At the time, I was writing checks for half a million. My friends would throw in half a million, we’d do the two-for-one swap, and we’d end up with two million to work with.

So I said, “I don’t want to throw in directly, because I always want to go through the market so we get more money to work with.” I asked, “What do we have for 200 meters that would answer some geological question?” They said, “Well, we’ve got this area about five and a half kilometers away — at the time it was called the Wildcat — and it looks like it has an EM anomaly at surface, ultramafic at surface. It’ll probably be another nickel discovery like we had.”

So I said, “Okay, let’s drill that.” And that’s when we got lucky. That’s sort of how the discovery process worked, Gerardo. As luck would have it, we discovered it right at the moment of breakup. That was the lithium summer — you remember that crazy lithium summer — when you guys had that big Patriot breakthrough that I missed.

Gerardo Del Real: Still going.

Terry Lynch: I know — yes, it’s good to see it come back. We couldn’t get rigs because the helicopter rigs were all rented by the lithium guys. So we couldn’t actually get back in to follow it up until it froze over in January. We had to wait eight months to follow up, and then, of course, we hit it again and it just lit up like a bottle rocket. That made us the top mining stock in Canada in 2024.

Last year was interesting. We got off to a good start, raised a bunch of money, and then obviously Trump got into the tariff thing, which destabilized the market for a while. So we changed tactics a bit in terms of how we approached the drill program. Instead of hitting our most obvious targets, we realized we needed to acquire a lot more land.

Historically, if you look at the 20 orthomagmatic discoveries, 19 of them are district plays — meaning they had multiple mines spread across several kilometers, even tens of kilometers. We realized that while we had 46 core kilometers, we didn’t have nearly enough.

So we went out and acquired that land package from Li-FT Power, which we talked about, and then we did additional staking as well. We ended up adding about 600% more land. Now, in our minds, there are eight regional targets up there, and we control seven of them.

So we really have the land position we need now to make this a true district play, which we think will ultimately unfold through the drill bit. That was really our focus last year. The stock had an up-and-down year and finished up a bit, but we felt it never really found its footing. This year, we’ve started off stronger, and obviously we delivered those crazy recovery numbers just this week, which prompted us to get on the phone and say hi to you guys.

Nick Hodge: Yes, we’ll get to metallurgy in a second. When did you realize you needed to expand the land package? Because I remember the early days of the Lion discovery and some of the pushback the market was giving, where people were saying, “Yes, this is a high-grade pod, but is it part of something bigger?” When did the company realize it was part of something bigger — that it could be district-scale?

Terry Lynch: Yes, we pretty much realized that out of the gate, Nick, but we didn’t have the ability to actualize it right away. We had to get the cash together, and probably the most important land package we needed was what we call the hydro lands. Those were bordering lands that were unstaked, but they couldn’t be staked by anyone because Hydro-Québec had a restriction on them.

It was a historic restriction that dated back to the James Bay days, and there really wasn’t a purpose for it anymore. But Hydro-Québec is obviously a huge organization, and getting their attention to remove what was a minor annoyance for them — but a big deal for us — took some work.

So I went to the James Bay Cree and talked to the Chief. I said, “Chief, look, we’ve got a great discovery here. I think this could be something special, but I think the other half of it is out here on these hydro lands. We need those restrictions removed, and I don’t think they’ll just do it for me. I think we need to show a unified face. Will you help me?” And he was kind enough — he did.

It took some time, but they were super cooperative. Eventually, we worked our way through the maze of bureaucracy at Hydro-Québec, and thanks to them, the lands were put back into the staking pool. We eventually won the staking rounds. I think we secured them in November, and since then we’ve been drilling on them. Probably our most exciting exploration targets right now are under the drill bit as we speak.

Gerardo Del Real: With all the drilling — right? With all the drilling and the high-grade hits, the copper hits, the very high-grade copper hits — and these coming over meaningful widths, it can be really easy for someone, especially someone newer to the space, to get confused. 

You touched on this earlier, right? The 7% copper over 32 meters — it can be difficult for a new investor to prioritize. Do I look at grade? Do I look at thickness? Does continuity matter? What about geometry?

For people who may be new to this space, what do you think they should be focused on as it relates to the Power Metallic story? Because now you have multiple discoveries you’re drilling, different numbers from different zones, and that can get confusing for new eyeballs.

Terry Lynch: Yes, I think this is the role you guys play so well — you help educate the audience. Obviously, when people are listening to me, they know my job is to sell the company and maximize value. So they believe me, but they also know I’m preaching in my own church. There’s always that question of, what’s the real truth?

That’s where great educators like yourselves can play a role. I think what you do is help people understand that there’s a lot that goes into a discovery and a lot that goes into turning a discovery into a mine. That includes geopolitical risk in the areas we’re working in, the complexity of the deposit, and how some products are easier to process than others — and how that drives economics.

At the end of the day, what makes the most valuable mine is one that’s close to surface, located in a geologically and politically stable area with minimal political risk, and that has high grade.

That’s really what we’ve been trying to teach people. We’re a near-surface deposit — it starts at about 40 meters. We start hitting pay dirt at 40 meters, and it’s significant pay dirt. From a payback perspective, we expect payback to be under a year when we build this thing.

For people to understand cash flow, one of the challenges we had was that we didn’t yet have definitive extraction numbers. That’s why the metallurgical study was so important. Before that, people were looking at Chalice and saying, “Well, maybe you guys are going to be like Chalice.”

Chalice was a three-billion-dollar market cap and then dropped down to around 600 million because of struggles with extraction and metallurgy. But that was a low-grade polymetallic. We always felt that with a high-grade polymetallic, it wouldn’t be like that — but that was still just our view.

Now we have scientific proof that this is not the case. That was the last remaining piece of data that independent analysts needed to come up with their own numbers on economic viability and to start forecasting PEAs and similar work. That’s why it was so important for us to get that data out there.

Nick Hodge: Gerardo mentioned grade, thickness, continuity, geometry. So I guess I’ll play my role, as you say, Terry, and do a little educating. I want to ask about continuity. What are you seeing at Lion, both along strike and at depth? What gives you the confidence this could be a larger and bigger resource in the future?

Terry Lynch: Yes. So on the Lion Zone itself, it’s been quite well behaved. It is a zoned system. So it zones from nickel to copper, and as a zoned system does, it gets thicker, and it gets thinner, and then it gets thicker again. So that’s always stressful when it gets thinner — you think, “Oh, shit, maybe we’ve lost it.” And then it gets thicker and you’re like, “Oh, great, we’ve got it again.” But that’s just the nature of it.

So we’ve had to learn to deal with those ups and downs, but within the Lion Zone it’s been pretty well behaved. So we’re adding tonnage that way, and we’ll get more assays out here in the next couple of weeks on that, some of the infill drilling we’re doing there that’s been successful. So we’ll ultimately look to probably be in a position to have a PEA or something like that at the end of this year or the first of next year.

So that’ll help, in a long way, I think, give full data support to people in that respect. And then on the exploration play, we’ve been using a technique called borehole EM. And that’s just where you basically use airborne as well as ground EM, and when the electromagnetics react to sulfide-carrying materials in the ground, it identifies where other sulfide materials are. Now, not all sulfide materials are metal materials. In our case, it has been that way.

So we’ve been super lucky, super blessed, to have an ore body or a mineralized area that’s just not filled with false positives. You can get a lot of false positives with borehole EM and stuff, but we’ve not had that. So we’ve been using this borehole EM, and with the borehole you just put the tool down the hole after you drill, and then you’re flashing, and you’re getting, within about 150 meters, a reading around where more sulfides are, and then you just continue to follow it if it keeps hitting.

So right now, when we started the campaign this summer, we did a couple of research holes — a couple of thousand-meter holes — down parallel to the structure of the Lion Zone using the borehole EM. And actually, at the bottom of the hole, we got our biggest EM anomaly ever. And so the boys wanted to extend it and drill into it. And I was like, “No, no, that’s the land we’re negotiating with Hydro-Québec, and we’ve got to finish that off before we make a discovery. Otherwise, who knows what’ll happen?”

So we stopped. And now finally, when we got it in November, we pushed through. And while that intersection didn’t happen, it did allow us to run the borehole again, and then we saw it was a little bit to the south and west. So we’re actually drilling that right now. We’re probably about, I guess, 20 days away from getting into that target — what we think will probably be the parent of the Lion Zone, which is probably some super-rich nickel-copper sulfide with PGE.

So that’s what’s happening right now on that side of things. And then we identified three other big targets. When we got the hydro lands, we primarily wanted it because the ultramafic — which the Lion Zone was associated with — falls back onto the hydro lands, and it’s likely that there’s a full hinge there. And so it was a high priority to get that, without the second half of the Lion being out there. And we’re drilling that right now.

We’re also drilling Lion West, which we had faulted out on the initial Lion Zone after about 450 meters of width. Then we went across the fault and started to find grade on the other side of the fault, so we’re following that up. And then something similar at Tiger Deep.

So we’ve got, I would say, four exciting big-picture exploration plays that, if any one of them hits, it probably immediately doubles the size of the deposit. And if the Elephant Zone hits, it could be five times the size. And historically, these orthomagmatics are much bigger than we currently are. 

The average size is over a million tons of contained metal. We’re probably somewhere between six and 800,000 right at the moment, and many are more than 10 million tons. So it would be unusual — it would be historic — for us not to be much bigger.

Gerardo Del Real: There’s so many different ways here to add value. You mentioned Tiger, expanding Lion, the other targets you’ve developed. Where do you see the biggest upside coming from? Or is it a combination of the exploration and increasing the tonnage and really understanding the broader picture as it relates to a district-scale system, which is what you referenced earlier?

Terry Lynch: Yes, we think the most obvious one is this Elephant, which is the area that’s four to five times the size of the Lion that we’re drilling into now. The hole is going to be about 1,300 meters. It’s an angled hole, though, so the true depth is probably about 900 meters. So we’ll pierce that, and if that is successful — and we believe it will be because we’re 100% for hitting these sulfides — some of them are two meters thick and some of them are 40 meters thick. So obviously we’re hoping this is a thick one.

But once we pierce it, we’ll be able to run some wedges off this — maybe run four or five holes off this one hole — which would really be impactful and could show a lot of excitement. I think that these orthomagmatics, they are nickel sulfides. Its origin was as a nickel sulfide, and then some sort of hydrothermal action happened and picked up the copper sulfides and brought them up to the surface, where they got stuck between faults and kept pulsing.

And this is why these pipes — the Lion Zone — were so rich. And so the key to successful polymetallic exploration is to find these pipes and navigate down them and ultimately find the source at the bottom. We haven’t found the source yet. So I would think the most excitement would be in finding the source.

And then, of course, any other pipes that we get would be — who wouldn’t want to find another Lion Zone, right? Throw another seven billion on there, right? Nothing wrong with that. So yes, I think we’re really blessed.

This is why, if you look at it, if guys would do one thing, we did a great case study at the start of the year where I got Joe Campbell and Steve Beresford, who are our top technical leaders, on and talking about our program going forward and why they were excited. They gave people, I think, a really good teaching lesson about this deposit type, how you approach it, and why we’re excited about it.

These guys have literally found big mines all around the world, and they’ve made big discoveries here at Nisk. And they’re excited as schoolchildren because, as scientists, they’ve got the capital to go and do the job right. They’re drilling where they want. I’m not telling them where to drill. They’re the guys running the drill bit, and they’re doing a hell of a job, and they’re super excited about it.

So of course, as a management team, we’re excited when they’re excited. You can watch that show — it’s on our website — and I think it’s a really good education for people on the technical side of things. And once they understand that, they’ll understand why we’re so excited on the business side as well.

Nick Hodge: From drilling and exploration on to metallurgy — which was your most recent news — you showed really high recoveries, which is super important, right? It’s one thing to have a discovery. It’s another thing to be able to get it out of the ground and separate the metal from the ore. But you showed really high recoveries across copper, PGMs, gold, and silver. Why is that so important right now?

Terry Lynch: Yes, I think with the polymetallics — probably because of some of the experiences like in Brazil and with Chalice and whatnot — where lower-grade polymetallic systems didn’t have the recoveries, it really messed up their economics and created problems for those projects, at least for the moment. Maybe there’s resurrection — we hope for both of them — but I think we were dealing with some of that headwind.

People were sort of saying, “Ah, your recoveries are going to be shit.” Even though we had done a lot of work to suggest that wasn’t going to be the case, that was still the perception. So getting that science out there to unequivocally say, “Hey, we had been using 80%, which we felt was conservative,” and then to show that it turned out to be tremendously conservative — more like 95% across the board — that was huge.

Then people say, “How is that even possible?” And it’s possible because Mother Earth has basically refined it for us. That’s what’s happened. This thing has been so folded and so mobilized as an ore body and mineralized area that it’s basically done the processing for us. That stuff just falls out. The copper is almost, I guess, 99%. I mean, how can you get better than that? It’s unreal.

Gerardo Del Real: That’s ridiculous. Look, we’ve got to talk capital markets. You mentioned meeting the biggest whale you’ve ever met while being in New York, and I know you’ve been overseas often over the past several years. Can we talk capital markets — your approach and what that looks like? Because clearly there’s a lot of money from a lot of new sources coming into the space.

Terry Lynch: Yes, I think probably the most important thing we’re doing is that we applied for, and intend to list in, New York. We hoped to have it done last year, but then the government shutdown happened and the stock fell off for a bit. We thought, “Well, we don’t really want to limp onto New York. We want to sort of roar onto New York, as a proper lion should.”

So we knew we had this metallurgy coming. We were confident it was going to be good. We knew we had some drill zones coming, and we were confident they were going to be exciting. So we thought, “Hey, let’s push it back a little bit and look toward the end of February.” But we’re really convicted about getting there because we just need access to better capital markets. The U.S. is the biggest capital market in the world.

New York has become the home for most of the premier mining companies, and we want to take our spot there and hopefully be more attractive to the institutional shareholders we ultimately need. Generally, with juniors, you can get so far with your retail network, your early hedge fund guys, and ultra-high-net-worth investors like Robert Friedman and others. But at some point, to push through to the billion-dollar level and beyond, you need institutional ownership. And they’re a lot more comfortable investing in New York-listed companies.

We talked about the whale I met in New York, but I also met a bunch of institutional funds there that historically have not been players in mining, but now are going to become players. Historically, mining made up maybe 10% of New York listings. Today it’s less than 1%.

Now you see presidents and prime ministers talking about mining. It’s become a keyword. People are realizing, “Holy cow, we haven’t invested enough in this space.” Governments are making direct investments in mining, and they’re setting up support structures to back it. 

So I think there’s going to be a lot of general interest from investors, and big pension funds and mutual funds will start pouring money into the mining space. You’ve got to be in the right venue for that, and for us, that’s New York.

We think it’ll be a really big move for us and one that could act as a catalyst for the stock. We’re hoping to get there by the end of February.

We’re fine for cash. We had $33 million in the bank at the end of last quarter, and we’ve got about $20 million worth of warrants or options expiring this year that are well in the money and coming in. So we’re okay on cash. But we want to be in front of the bigger capital markets and give ourselves the ability to have some of these big institutions step up and take meaningful positions.

I was with a fund here in the UK that’s a current shareholder — I think they’re a $2.4 billion mining fund — and their general approach is they want at least a 1% position. That would be $24 million. They’re probably closer to maybe $10 million with us right now, so less than half a position. But I think they’ll move up to a full position. It just shows you the size you need to be to warrant that kind of capital. These funds want to write $20 to $30 million checks, and you’ve got to be big enough to accept that.

Nick Hodge: Let’s beef up the credibility a little bit. You said earlier you were preaching in your own church, or preaching to the choir. What are the remaining risks or questions that you still need to answer for Power Metallic? Or what could change that would cause you to rethink the plan you’re currently executing?

Terry Lynch: We’re going forward with the concept that this is going to be a lot bigger. At some point, if we’ve got another 65,000 meters of drilling we’re doing — we go over 65 — then I think we’d have to read something into that. We’re going to continue to finish off the discovery of the Lion Zone. So we’ll validate that.

Worst-case scenario, in our view, Nick, we’ll have a million-ton-a-year mine and a very profitable one that pays itself back in a year, and that’s worth a lot more than what we’re currently worth. So that’s our worst-case scenario in our view. And especially now that this new money is coming in, we feel like that really is the worst case. So that’ll be the fallback position. And then the next step really is just to see how big it can be.

And whenever you’re dealing with the drill bit, there’s always uncertainty. We added a bunch more land. We’re exploring that in a methodical way. We’ve got some cool new technology we’re going to bring to the table that should help us explore, but it’s a technology that takes about six months to start to get really good readings, and really up to a year. So we’re trying to approach things as a big company would, in terms of the science. Let the science do the work and don’t rush the process.

I mean, we’re trying to find out as quickly as we possibly can, but science will take the time science takes. So we can’t prejudge when the discovery will happen. We just have to believe the process, execute, and let our guys do their thing.

Gerardo Del Real: What in that process would cause you to say, “All right, Terry, you’re being a bit too aggressive. Time to slow it down.” It’s easy to say, “Well, if we find the source, we’re going to ramp it up.” If you see more than 64,000 meters, you know it’s for a good reason, right? What would cause the opposite of that?

Terry Lynch: Yes, the cool thing about our drilling approach is that every time we drill into a new area, we use borehole EM. So if we don’t get any hits from the borehole EM, we know there’s nothing out there. That’s pretty conclusive. So we stop pushing in that area.

Eventually, we’ve got so many open targets — more open targets than we have cash to drill them. So I’m thinking we’d have to go back to the market for more cash to exhaust all the targets we currently have. And I can’t imagine, given how the science has worked so far in terms of the borehole EM, that it wouldn’t continue to allow the system to grow.

But I mean, that possibility exists, right? At the end of the day, all ore bodies end, and we’ll come to the end of Nisk and Lion at some point. But my guess is that’s a long way out. Steve believes we’ll be drilling on this thing for the next 10 years. So that’s how big it’s going to be. We’ll see.

Nick Hodge: Let’s not look out 10 years. Let’s look out 12 to 18 months. We’ve covered the history of the project. You’re drilling right now — what should investors be looking for over the next 12 to 18 months? And when do you think, or what do you think would be the moment when the market finally gets it?

Terry Lynch: Yes, we’re pretty excited about our winter drill program this year. Right now, we’ve got three rigs turning. We’ll have five rigs turning by the end of the month, and we expect to have seven rigs at peak later this quarter. So we’re going to answer a lot of questions over that period of time.

We think we’ll probably drill about 35,000 meters between now and the end of April. So that’s a fair bit of dirt turning, and we think that’ll go a long way toward providing some clarity. Now, imagine if we hit this Elephant target that’s four or five times the size of the Lion. We’ve been on Lion for two years. If this is four or five times the size, how long will that take? It’ll take some time, right?

But that’s when you throw more rigs at it. You ramp up the exploration program. These are first-world problems, as they say. What we’re really trying to do is identify those next big zones and punch enough holes into them to show continuity. Then you can really start to see the size of this thing.

I was talking over the last couple of days with a few funds, and their minimum check size is around $50 million. That’s generally what they want to put into deals like this. Before, it was more like, “Well, it’s a nice story, but probably not.” Now it’s more like, “Yes, we can see you getting there. You’re not there yet, but it looks like you’ve got the bones of a world-class discovery.” And that’s what we’re trying to validate over the next four months.

From an investor-catalyst perspective, obviously watch the assay results. Look for the move to New York — I think that’ll be a catalyst. There’s also some interesting new technology we’ll talk about once it’s fully deployed and we can explain why we think it could be material in advancing the discovery.

We try to be very communicative with our shareholders — show them what we’re doing, why we’re doing it. We routinely hold quarterly sessions with our technical team where people can ask questions. This isn’t a mystery. We’re not trying to fool anyone. We’re trying to be transparent about what we’re doing and why we think it’s the right approach.

We’ll make mistakes along the way — we already have — and we’ll learn from them, correct them, and do it better. So that’ll be the approach. We’ll keep letting the science drive the boat here and back our science team to the hilt.

Gerardo Del Real: But before I let you go, I’ve got to ask — let’s look to the future. It’s two to three years from now. You’re sitting there looking back. What would it have taken for you to believe that Power Metallic was a success? What would make you say, “We did that”? What needs to happen over the next two or three years for you to get to that point?

Terry Lynch: Yes, for me, I’ve always felt that, for sure, this is going to become a unicorn. Okay. I just know it in my bones. And if it doesn’t become a unicorn, I’ll be depressed. I really just feel like this is… everyone’s got a billion-dollar mine in them if they can sort of find it, and I think this is ours.

I look at Sakatti, which is another Anglo American discovery in Finland — the last of these types, right? — about 18 years ago. The core of it was around 47 million tons. It’s grown since then. I think they’ve expanded the resource, and now it’s up to like 160 or 170 million tons, NI 43-101. We’ve always felt that we could get there.

So I really would like to get to five million tons of contained metal. I mean, dreaming would be to get to 10, because that would put you in the Sudbury category or Olympic Dam, and there aren’t a lot of those. One can dream. But I could certainly see five million tons as possible, and that would be a monstrous discovery.

So those are the numbers. I firmly believe that we should be able to deliver a 10-bagger from here, and maybe we can still deliver a 50-bagger. But I mean, US$10 is sort of my number. So we’ve got a long ways to go.

Gerardo Del Real: This has been great. Terry, it was overdue. Really, really appreciate the time. Closing on thinking you can deliver a 10-bagger and maybe a 50-bagger is a hell of a close. I don’t want to step on that, but I do want to thank you — and Nick — for your time.

Terry Lynch: Yes, I’ll probably take a lot of heat for that because everyone says, “Terry, you’re just too promotional.” And I’m saying, “Yes, yes — you know what? I’m a believer, for sure.”

Everyone knows I’ve written the most checks other than Friedman at this point. We’ve been writing checks. I bought 600,000 shares in the last six weeks. When that dip happened, I stepped in and bought and told the world to buy — that the story was intact — and it was the right move.

So I’m the number-one fan, but I’m also trying to educate, too, like you guys. We’re trying to reach out on X and talk to people who are not mining investors in a way that gets them engaged. You can’t talk boring stuff. You’ve got to tell the story and then let them validate it.

I take heat from the mining guys who say, “Wow, you’re going on and doing one-minute clips like some sort of influencer.” And I say, “Guys, I’m trying to talk to an audience.” Remember, less than 1% of people are interested in mining. If we just talk to ourselves, we’re not going anywhere. We’ve got to expand the tent.

Let’s get out there and talk to people who’ve made money in other things, including technology, which has dominated the world and will continue to. Those AI guys have made billions. Somehow, we’ve got to interest those guys.

Now they’re realizing, hey, if we want power, we need mining. If we want to drive a car, we need mining. So it’s on the top of their minds now. But we still have to talk to them, explain why there could be exciting returns, and help them understand how to think about these opportunities.

I think we all, as participants in the mining space, have to get over ourselves and talk more directly to new investors and encourage them to participate. Because as a generalist, you look at things and think, “Wow, the tech market’s super toppy.” Meanwhile, despite the commodity roar, mining is cheaper than it’s ever been on an earnings basis. And we all know lots of great exploration stories that still get no respect. There’s a lot of value here.

So if you can’t get excited about this space right now, I don’t know when you can. 

Gerardo Del Real: You keep adding, Terry. There are a lot of people watching everything they should be watching — which is their business, right?

Terry Lynch: True that.

Gerardo Del Real: I think we’ll leave it there. Terry, thank you so much. Appreciate the time, sir.

Terry Lynch: Thanks, guys. Have a great night.

Gerardo Del Real: Alright, cheers.

Nick Hodge: Cheers for now. Thanks.

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