Cupani Metals Targets a Raglan-Scale Copper-Nickel System at Blue Lake

0:14Welcome back to Mining Stock Daily. Ian Wagner here on Tuesday, October 6th with an introduction to a new company here at Mining Stock Daily. Kupani Metals is an explorer and developer in Quebec, looking for the next major copper nickel PGE deposit. And with us today to kind of talk about the company, its founding, its land package, and what they're doing up there in the north is Brian Boss, CEO of Coupani Metals. They trade on the CSE under the symbol C-U-P-A and on the O-T-C-Q-B under the symbol C-U-P-I-F. Brian, good to see you. Welcome to the podcast. I believe it is your first time.

1:01Brian Bosse: It is, Ian. Thank you for having us on or having me on. And this is the first time I've ever talked about the company on a podcast. So I got the butterflies. Let's see how it goes. Yeah. You're a longtime listener, first time caller, so to speak. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Cool. Well, let's jump into it. And I think it probably is good to maybe talk about how you've kind of assembled this company, because I know you put together some claims. You guys are obviously looking for nickel and copper and PGE, and we'll get into a little of the geology, but maybe just give a little bit of a corporate background and kind of how you got to the fall of 2026.

1:44Brian Bosse: Sure. I'll even go a little farther back because eventually this will be relevant. There is a visible gosson, so that's rusted rock, at surface that a geologist saw at the window of his aircraft in 1942. And that geologist was working for a company that only cared about iron ore. And eventually they got around to drilling that rusty rock and they found copper and nickel. Because they were an iron ore only company, they just left it. And that location was 40 miles or 65 kilometers away from an existing railhead with iron ore open pits that had been running since the 1940s, which is the same company that Geologist was working for.

2:31Brian Bosse: So it just kind of sat for decades. And then in the 1980s, a smaller company came along and asked the iron company, hey, did you guys ever test your drill core? for anything other than iron, copper, and nickel? Like what about platinum, palladium, silver, cobalt? And the answer was, no, they didn't. And so about 1985, a small company bought this project from the large iron ore company, and they spent in today's dollars, that small company would have spent about 50 million bucks. They put 168 holes into mineralization, and they came up with, what is 4.3 million tons of 2.2 % copper equivalent. Now, we're not going to call that a resource because this drilling was done in the 1980s and this is a Canada company, so the 43-101 rules apply and the rules don't have a grandfather clause.

3:32Brian Bosse: So the rules came in about 2003. This drilling happened before that and so is not compliant. We'll get to that someday. So here's where the corporate history starts. That 4.3 million tons, they did a bulk sample, they did metallurgy, and then that company eventually faded away because they were based on platinum palladium. And in the 90s, the platinum palladium prices fell. A couple of guys were watching though. One of them was a, he's now passed on. He used to be my boss, a guy named Ned Goodman, who founded a company called Dundee. And there's many arms to Dundee now. They're into real estate.

4:11Brian Bosse: They used to be into asset management. There's a precious metals mining company, the gold company, DPM. That's Dundee Precious Metals. And that fellow, he knew that this project that had been drilled by somebody else's company was the start of something. And he knew even more when the Raglan Mine, which is now owned by Glencore, opened in 1997, that the theories underlying the Raglan mine, geologic theories, would also apply to this 4.3 million tons that was drilled in the 80s. And so he started staking around the claim block that had the 4.3 million tons. So he's trying to lock up the land. And that sparked a consolidation that didn't finish until 2024.

4:57Brian Bosse: So from 1990 until 2024, the, the echo, the ghost of the company that did that drilling, they still held the land claims for the exploration claims, uh, for that 4.3 million tons, but they had no ability to grow. Uh, whereas my old boss, Ned Goodman had surrounded him with claims. And so there was this kind of Mexican standoff, right? One's got the peanut butter, the other's got the chocolate together. They'd be great. And, um, I'm in my early fifties. I happened to outlast everybody. and I managed to consolidate it all into one company in the year 2024. Okay, and there's some interesting side pockets along the way.

5:38Brian Bosse: Anglo-American used to own about one quarter of the land. Where we're drilling now is actually land that they used to hold. But that would have gotten us, that's covered the land claim exercise that we need to explain. And then in 2018, I got involved with the company. We hadn't finished the land claim consolidation yet. In fact, it was still very much an open question whether we'd be the winner. But I was asked to keep the company alive because it was already public. And, you know, the chairman had become ill and couldn't serve anymore. So we put together a deal where I would keep it alive. I put my own money in.

6:18Brian Bosse: I think I paid six cents for all my shares. I own 23 % of the company. and I kept it alive by living off of some fixed income that the company had. So we didn't actually raise any equity at all between the years 2018 when I took over and 2024 when we finished the consolidation and started exploration. So Ian, I don't know how deep you want to go into what I've just told you, but that's as clean as I can put it in 35 seconds. No, that's good. That's interesting. I mean, so that's what's important there, obviously. So this isn't ground that you're walking on for the first time and someone is walking on for the first time.

6:58So what I think would be helpful would be to kind of explain for anyone who doesn't know Raglan. Well, first of all, kind of where are you guys at? And where I know you're in northern Quebec, I can see from your deck you're near. I'm probably going to butcher it. Shefferville?

7:12Brian Bosse: Hang on. Shefferville, yeah. Shefferville. Right. So kind of paint the picture for us. Where are you guys at? And then what is Ragland and what is sort of the geological or the economic geological thesis there? What do they have and what do you guys think that you are looking for in terms of that nickel, cobalt, PGE, copper mixture? Okay. So for an American audience, I'll say we're 500 miles straight north of Vermont. And that would, yes, put us in Quebec. The town of Shefferville, which you mentioned, that's the town that has the iron ore open pits that have been running since the 1940s. There's a railway that takes ore from those mines down to a port on the Atlantic Ocean.

7:57Brian Bosse: And that Atlantic Ocean port is called Satelle, Quebec, Seven Islands. And, you know, there's Seven Islands in the harbor. That's where the name comes from. And that port is undergoing expansion right now. So where are we? We are 40 miles from that railhead to the east or east-northeast. And we're in an area that geologists refer to as the Labrador Trough. And I'll explain what that is as best I can. The Labrador Trough is part of the edge of a smaller piece of North America that 2 billion years ago had not yet solidified to become part of the whole of North America. So said another way, all continents are made up of smaller pieces.

8:49Brian Bosse: The smaller pieces are called cratons. Okay, so let's say five cratons to a continent, just to pick a number. And in like a baseball, where the pieces of leather that are the cratons come together, you get stitching, you get volatility. And 1.9 billion years ago, when these two pieces of what are now North America were coming together, the volatility was that the magma from the center of the earth or underneath the mantle was able to come up vertically through the seam and spread across the surface like a river, like the Mississippi. It went on for hundreds of miles. and that river theory of course depends on the belief that continents are made up of smaller pieces which of course believes depends on the belief that continents actually move which everyone accepts now Ian but in the 1950s that was a crazy idea in the 1970s it was becoming less crazy but to do exploration based on that in 1985 no way and so when I talk about the raglan mine, which is on the same seam that we are, that is a mine where Glencore has found their copper and nickel, platinum, palladium, cobalt, by looking into the seam that was made 1.9 billion years ago, because that seam, like I said, is like a flowing river of liquid rock, magma.

10:20Brian Bosse: The metals that you want came up from inside the planet within that magma. And then just like any other kind of river, like the Mississippi, you'll get sandbars on the bottom where the river was carrying something that weighs more than water, like a piece of rock or a piece of sand. And where the river loses its energy, those things will vertically fall out of the water column and just make a sandbar or a puddle. Puddle is the wrong word if you're talking about water, but a pool of metals along the bottom of the riverbed. And so the Raglan mine has been explored and opened since 1997, and they're finding the metals that are along the bottom of the old riverbed.

11:03And one thing on the Raglan, I just want to point out, just in case anyone's off, Raglan is not a small, little, cute, little artisanal mine up there. Oh, Lord, no. I mean, you know, Raglan hosts a workforce of, I think, over 1 ,000 people, over 1 ,200 people. They're still finding, growing that material resource, and it is big, right? Like that's what I want to kind of make sure that, you know, is understood, that it's not like.

11:26Brian Bosse: Yeah. So I guess that's one of the first things people should know is we are a tiny company chasing elephants. And so Glencore itself is a hundred billion market cap company. Okay. And as you can immediately tell from that, for them to hold on to a mine, I mean, it has to be at least worth four or five percent of their market cap. They also have smelters. They have other commodities. There's a lot going on in Glencore. But, you know, you look at the Raglan mine and I don't think Glencore would sell it to anybody for less than four or five billion dollars. So if what we have, the Blue Lake Project, can become the next Raglan mine, then that's going to be excellent for our shareholders, even if someone else builds it or if we build it ourselves.

12:13Brian Bosse: Because our market cap, instead of being$4 or$5 billion, is$8 million. It's tiny. So we know we're looking for the right thing. We're using the theories that were proven. We're using the technology that is of 2026. were essentially like a time machine. We get to go back and work on a project that hasn't been touched since 1987. Yeah, so let's jump into what Blue Lake is specifically and especially this corridor, right? And I think the lenses is important to sort of talk about or tell us what that is and what that means and just kind of paint that picture for us. Sure. I'm going to keep, if it's okay about you, I'm going to keep relying on this river metaphor.

12:57Yep.

12:58Brian Bosse: Because it gets me around the whole magmatic channel conversation that y 'all would just love, but no one else can understand. Yep. Makes sense. So take in your mind, whether it's the St. Lawrence River or the Mississippi River or the Missouri, whatever it is, something that's flowing for hundreds of miles and it's carrying things inside of it that is heavier than water. okay so little pieces of of the rocky mountains are flowing in the misery river and they end up becoming a sandbar somewhere in louisiana on the mississippi so now we're going to take that same concept and talk about it with metals when lava and if you think about hawaii or or iceland right now when lava is moving away from a volcano very often you don't see the red hot stuff because it's under 10 feet of cooled, crusted rock that used to be red hot.

13:54Brian Bosse: And so it's flowing. It's almost like an underground river, or it is an underground river. And that's what we had here 1.9 billion years ago. And the metals were flowing in that river. Then the reason the metals fall out of the river and make our deposits or lenses, sometimes people will call it, or sandbars, if you're going to use a water river metaphor, is because like any river, it has a hard time going uphill. So sometimes it'll just lose its energy and the momentum will stop and the metals will literally fall out into a hole in the riverbed if it has to go uphill. Another thing, and this is actually more important for us, is that when lava or magma passing over sulfur happens, the sulfur gets melted or the rock that's holding the sulfur gets melted.

14:46Brian Bosse: The sulfur starts to interact with the magma and it actually traps the metals in little bubbles. They become collectively heavier than the magma and they precipitate out. They vertically fall down out of the column of lava. And so that's what's happened for most of what we've seen so far. And this is why the metals that we find are inside of a formation called massive sulfides. This is where the lava or the magma has passed over a source of sulfur. The sulfur has been heated and released into the magma. The sulfur then traps the metals that are there and drags them or scours them or precipitates them vertically out to the bottom of the flowing lava.

15:38Brian Bosse: And that's what makes the lenses or sandbars or puddles of metal, if you will, the metals are inside a puddle of sulfur. I can go over a couple more times, but that's the basic idea in terms of how I can describe it without getting super technical. No, I think that's that's good. I think actually I would say to pivot a little bit more to the, you know, sort of the practical, where we see that in 2026 and how that informs kind of what you guys are doing. And so by that, I mean, I'm looking at, say, Sly, your Sly deck. You know, I'm seeing this high priority corridor as part of your land package and obviously some magnetic, I think, you know, anomalies.

16:23anomalies, but tell us what you, since you consolidated those claims, like what, what have you done? I know that you drilled, um, you guys have drilled, you see got Pogo, you got center, we got Blue Lake. What are those? What is this sort of exploration strategy right now?

16:40Brian Bosse: So the reason why we've claimed the land that we did for exploration is because we figured out this magmatic river or magmatic flow is what created the deposits that were already known by the 1980s. And we're the first people to put that into action. So we staked all the land whose surface rock looks like it used to be the flowing lava. So that got us 400 square miles of land package, which is huge. Then we are starting, because of course you can only do one thing at a time really well. So we are starting not everywhere on the project. We're starting what we call the high priority, the high potential corridor, and we're doing that immediately adjacent to the known tonnage.

17:26Brian Bosse: Okay, so the known tonnage is Pogo and Blue Lake 2 and that 4.3 million tons, some of which starts at surface, and some of which importantly, Blue Lake number two, which is flat lying, right? So it's only 150 meters below surface. So in feet, that's 450, 500 feet below surface and it's lying flat and it's two thirds of a mile long in places it's a quarter mile wide and it's anywhere between 20 and 40 feet thick or tall at different spots because you know the drills will give you an average so that's super exciting because if something's shallow and horizontal yeah then then the mining economics get really good so we figured out that that deposit structure flat lying and found within the old riverbed of the magmatic channel is exactly what we should be looking for.

18:25Brian Bosse: So we, yes, we've started drilling. We went down the high potential corridor. And by the way, the high potential corridor is nothing more than the area where when Anglo-American did magnetic surveys in the year 2012 on this land, they found the magnetic response that we now think is the magmatic channel from 1.9 billion years ago. So think of it as we're using their homework to see where the riverbed is. Okay. So now we're drilling along that riverbed in places where there's a magnetic response. Sometimes there's actually sulfur indications on the surface rock that tell you that sulfur process that I mentioned earlier had happened in the same spot.

19:09Brian Bosse: And then other things you'll see might be an electromagnetic response because remember these massive sulfides containing metals, they conduct electricity or they conduct a charge for a brief second if you pass a charge through them. So we use those three things to triangulate where to drill. So what have we done? We've gone a mile away, 1.4 kilometers, almost a mile, away from the last, the southern tip of the known tonnage. And we've drawn a line across the high potential corridor, cutting it perpendicular. And we've drilled along that line, and I think we've done now about 12 holes, all of which were drilled in 2026.

19:47Brian Bosse: And I think almost all of which have hit the same sulfuric riverbed system. And I think six of them so far have hit mineralization. So not only have we proved this magmatic riverbed theory, we've proved that it exists a mile away from the known tonnage, which therefore I think also proves that the entire next 10 miles of high potential corridor is going to be the same thing. And the space between the known tonnage and the mile that we've drilled should also be the same thing. So we have shown a new exploration theory. We've proved it with drilling. We've hit mineralization that's coming back at the same grade.

20:36Brian Bosse: Our last press release earlier this, maybe a few days ago, was that we drilled 2.9 meters. So that's just about 10 feet thick. It's only 400 feet down. It's flat lying, just like we said, everything else was a mile away. The Blue Lake number two. and it's grading. And remember, we've got a conservative number on grade here because we haven't done our own metallurgy yet, very early for us. It's coming in at 1.7 copper equivalent and that's assuming only 80 % recovery. Eventually we'll do our own metallurgy and I assume that recovery will move up into the 90s and then if you redo the math, it's basically 2 % copper equivalent.

21:19Brian Bosse: And that equivalence, we haven't talked about that yet, Ian. You're welcome to go read the release for the actual figures, but to a podcast, I'll say out of a dollar of revenue at such a mine, it looks like about 55 cents would be copper, five cents for platinum, five cents palladium. Possibly you'll get something five cents for cobalt. That's in the future. We don't know that. And the remainder, which I think is what, 40 odd cents, 30 cents is nickel. So that's a great set of metals for the next 15, 20, 25 years. A couple of things there. Just to touch on the last point, you know, I was going to ask you historically from that resource, what you were seeing in terms of the breakup of the nickel, the cobalt, the copper.

22:08And I'm looking at a slide you guys have of this kind of nickel cobalt, nickel copper PGE triangle. And it looks like Blue Lake kind of it's there in the middle, right? It's not super heavy nickel, which is good right now, right? I think, you know, if you've got to choose the nickel or copper right now, you certainly want to be choosing copper. But, you know, so you're seeing polymetallic, that's consistent with what your historic numbers were there. And then I guess just to kind of circle back, you know, I think You talked about this high-potential corridor, high-priority corridor, and you're drilling a mile or a kilometer away from those historic drillings, away from Blue Lake 1 through 5.

22:56You're still seeing mineralization.

22:58Brian Bosse: Go ahead. Yeah, let me jump in here. The reason why it's high-priority for us is because the magnetic response tells us it's flat. So imagine 10 miles or 16 kilometers for the rest of the world, where you're expecting to find flat-lying oar bodies at about 400 feet down, which can be two-thirds of a mile long and an eighth or a quarter of a mile thick, wide, with anywhere between, you know, eight to 30 foot thickness. Like if you can get 10 mile opportunity like that, that means the economics of a large project become amazing because, you know, at Ragland, that same river of lava, which they've now found in mind is tilted 35 degrees.

23:47Brian Bosse: So they have to, they have to have a higher cost per ton as they extract the deeper material. right and then the same kind of geology uh at talon or at power metallic same same concepts right same geology concepts those are essentially vertical so if you're half a kilometer or or even half a mile or a mile below surface the cost of extracting that the operating cost is much higher than it will be for us so although it doesn't show up in the exploration numbers i'm super excited about what the economics of this will be. And that's why I think we've got something very special here. Yeah, it's almost like you guys have these kind of blobs, right, that are sort of sitting there under the surface.

24:35And rather than, say, to use just a visual analogy, you're not chasing veins all around, right? Oh, Lord, no, no, no. You're chasing these shallow, thick, flat blobs of metal, which could translate into dollars. So just to kind of bring current, you guys drilled, so it's October, 2026. You talked about your winter drill season. That would have been January, February of this year, calendar 2026. You got some stuff back. You've been drilling now this summer, fall. Where is that at? How many meters? How many holes? Just maybe give us kind of the nuts and bolts of that. And then are assays still coming in?

25:20What's the snapshot of where things are?

25:23Brian Bosse: Yes, assays are still coming. So as you may know, a lot of the labs are backed up. So the only thing, we have all of our winters in and we've press released all that. And the winter drillings were the first round of proof of the whole system, as we understand that is exactly what we think. right same grade same orientation a mile away or a quarter uh 1.4 kilometers away from distance then the summer drilling was 1.4 kilometers or almost a mile away but on a slightly different angle right so further uh further across the the the line we've drawn and so those are all coming back there's one of them that we press released back in september we could see in the drill core that it looked fantastic.

26:11Brian Bosse: So we took pictures. We put out a press release, I think, September 2nd, saying that we've drilled this good-looking thing and that we're going to get rush assays. And the rushes came back and we press released that last week. That's hole 10. Is that right? That's hole 10. Yeah, 2.9 meters. And I think that's 1.7 and change. And remember, that's using only 0.8 as recovery. So that's proven a bunch of different things. Hole 10, of course, you know, 10 foot thick or 2.9 meters, like that's clearly machine mineable, right? If it's only three feet, well, that's a different problem. 10 feet, you know, you can machine mine that.

26:55Brian Bosse: Then we're waiting on assays for that full hole because we only sent rush on the 2.9 meters, but that 2.9 meters started at 159 meters down. So there's a lot more to see because in our press releases on that hole and in all the other holes, we've seen disseminated mineralization. So you might have something floating in the vertical column above that mass of sulfide that might be a third of the grade, which on its own would be no good. But in proximity to what we already have, it becomes very exciting. We'll see where that goes. And then we have other holes where we have the same expected intercept, but it may not be 10 feet.

27:42Brian Bosse: It might be 5 feet, 7 feet, who knows what. So we're waiting on all of that to come, and we will press release all of that. And then we've done other things as well. We have done our best to get our hands on the historical database from the company that did the drilling in the 1980s. So we might have something to say about that. in the near future. And that will be, hopefully, more information we can put out into the market for the market to begin to recognize that although the 4.3 million tons is not 43.1 compliant, it has value. It has drill results. I mean, if you just calculate, and this is unfair to the company at the moment, but if you calculate the metals in the ground, that's$1.6 billion on the 4.3 million tons.

28:35Brian Bosse: So that's not enough to get started on a project, but it's probably a third of what you would need. Yeah, I mean, 168 holes is not nothing, right? Like that's a substantial amount of holes for historical resource. And obviously to your point, it's non-compliant, but just kind of, yeah, I mean, and just to ask a quick, what can you do there? What do you think you can do? Is this simply a matter of scanning, making a database, re-logging? Like, are you able to get core or do you then sort of plan your drills around confirming what was there and put that out as your resource? Or do you kind of work your way down this corridor for new material?

29:18Like, part of my, the big part of that question is kind of corporate strategy. And what do you do, what do you prioritize over the next, you know, six, 12 months?

29:27Brian Bosse: Yeah, those are the great questions that we are grappling with ourselves. First of all, we've done a great drill season, improved our theory. So we're going to continue to take a breath till we get the assays in. Then we'll learn everything we can from the assays. But you touch on one of the key questions we had in when we were designing our 2026 drill campaign, which I don't think I fully answered. So yeah, 12 holes, and I think we're just under 3 ,000 meters in terms of drilling. Okay, yep. You know, we made a decision to not go to the historics because nobody cares about what you already have.

30:04Brian Bosse: Although I don't think we're getting credit for it. The stock's been crushed, so we'll have to figure that out. The thing people want to know is what can you turn this project into? So a step out of a mile, like that's a big bite. So that's why we thought that's the right thing to do. The drilling for 2027, yeah, we may find that the step out, the continual step out, whether that's adding new drilling around the line we've just drawn to see what it becomes, or maybe stepping out into further mile down the road to show that the next mile has the same thing. or going back to the historicals, because we may find that today's assays are coming from the lab are more comprehensive than the assays we find in the database.

30:51Brian Bosse: Because remember, as I told you, on some of them, they didn't, the first company, the iron ore company, wasn't testing for anything in the PGM space. So the, ironically, it looks like the PGM company wasn't always testing for copper nickel. So, and it looks like as far as we can tell, nobody was testing for cobalt or rhodium or some of the things that have value today that should be expected in this kind of a system. So those three things, you know, continue to drill around and add our step out, step out another mile or another distance just to prove to the world that the whole system is bigger than we think it is, or go back and get fresh data from the historics.

31:36Brian Bosse: We may do one of those, two of those or a mix of all three, that is something that is an open conversation within the team. And we'll figure that probably in the next month and a half. Because you are kind of a, you know, early-ish stage. It's early, man. Don't be shocked. Early stage micro cap. I mean, how do you kind of as the face and the head, kind of how do you make sure that you get the resources you and your team need to, to get to kind of, you know, to get this, develop this asset? So first of all, I'm the largest shareholder and I own 23%. Our total of insiders is 37 % at the moment. We own it because we know this project is going to prove to have tremendous value over the years ahead.

32:26Brian Bosse: And you're right. We're going to have to have more cash in order to drill more, in order to prove more. The mechanics of what we do first are going to come down to getting out and telling the story. Like I said, it'd be opener. This is our first podcast. We're going down to different conferences now that we have drill holes. We'll be banging the drum and we'll be out telling people what we have. We'll be telling the majors what we have. We'll be telling the exploration investors what we have. We did it in the past year with tax credit flow-through funds. And, you know, they buy it for the tax credit.

33:08Brian Bosse: They don't really care where the company goes. They just want to sell their paper out and buy the next tax credit. And I get that. But we didn't have any drill holes to prove our theory when we did that. Now we do. I expect once we get our full assays out and we tell the world what we have, that we're going to get a welcome reception. and we'll raise as we need to when the moment's right. I think that's probably a good place, Brian, for us to kind of leave it to today. I think this is a good intro to who you guys are, what you're looking for, and how you're trying to get there. And that's key.

33:44And I think as, you know, maybe we can catch up with you again as these assays come back and the fall kind of turns into winter and you guys start planning your 2027. but I think this is a good kind of stopping point for today and let people kind of digest this. If they want to know more, where should they go? What should they do?

34:09Brian Bosse: As you can tell by this, I love to talk about it. So email me, call me. Company website is kuponimetals.com. Can I give my phone number right out? That's up to you. No rules against it on my end. 416-844-5712. If you're interested in what you've heard, give me a call. Let's talk more. All right. Well, that is Brian Boss, CEO of Coupani Metals. They trade on the CSE under the symbol C-U-P-A and on the OTCQB under the symbol C-U-P-I-F.

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