Coniagas Drills Into Quebec’s ‘Graal,’ Hunting a Battery Metal Bonanza

In the boreal forests north of Saguenay, where smoldering wildfires can halt a drill rig as surely as a market crash, Frank Basa is chasing a funnel-shaped orebody he calls Graal—a potential trove of nickel, copper, cobalt and platinum-group metals that could help feed the electric-vehicle revolution. “We’re trying to do a targeted drilling program,” Basa told InvestorNews host Tracy Hughes. “It’ll be a small program, only about 9,600 meters… We finally got our drill permit.” For the President, CEO and Director of Coniagas Battery Metals Inc. (TSXV: COS), “small” is relative: the 9,600-meter winter campaign is merely the gateway to what he hopes will balloon into the 60,000- to 150,000-meter marathons that defined his earlier ventures.Coniagas is a Canadian junior whose strategy is to develop critical-mineral projects for the battery supply chain. At its 100%-owned Graal property, geophysics and shallow scout holes have already mapped mineralization along a six-kilometer strike length, confirming an open-pit model capped by “very wide widths of copper, nickel, cobalt,” as Basa put it. The next milestone arrived on Sept. 8, when Quebec’s Ministère des Ressources naturelles et des Forêts issued an Authorization for Impact-Causing Exploration Work (ATI), clearing the way for diamond drilling. “Receiving this permit marks an important milestone in our exploration efforts,” Basa said in a statement. “We believe that the region has significant potential for battery metals, and we are eager to begin drilling to further evaluate and unlock the value of this project.”Basa, a metallurgist by training and a veteran dealmaker, has long argued that Quebec offers a uniquely fertile backdrop for resource developers. “Of all the provinces in Canada and probably in North America, I’ve never met anybody more supportive of the resource industry than Quebec,” he told Hughes. Through its financier Investment Québec, the province “will fund anything to the tune of half a billion, a billion dollars. It’s not a problem… They already offered us a site that’s next to a port with rail service and also allocated power for us.” In an industry where megaprojects have stalled over transmission-line delays, the promise of pre-allocated hydroelectric power is no small enticement.Graal’s shape, Basa likes to say, resembles a martini glass—a broad open-pit bowl that could transition to underground mining as grades and metals prices dictate. Two mineralized zones flank the central “stem”; if drilling shows they coalesce, Coniagas could be sitting on what miners call “elephant country.” The deposit’s geometry also informs its name. “There’s a reason for it being called Graal—it’s shaped like a funnel,” Basa said with a chuckle. “We haven’t targeted that zone yet. We’ve been on the outskirts… It’s not a small deposit. It’s massive.”Yet the company’s share price tells a humbler story. Launched at 25 cents, Coniagas drifted as low as 2.5 cents this summer, weighed down by what Basa calls “free paper” distributed when the stock listed. “Somebody got something for nothing, and they just sold it,” he acknowledged. Roughly 24 million shares are issued, but only about 6 million trade freely; most of the rest remain escrowed or slated for future distributions to shareholders of Basa’s other companies. Marketing has been minimal. “Somewhere between now and the end of the year, we’ll get some marketing going, a drill program going, and hopefully it recovers.”