Elevate Uranium will upgrade a significant portion of the Koppies JORC-inferred mineral resource to the indicated category in 2025.
Elevate Uranium has two large uranium project areas in the Erongo Region: the Koppies Project Area and the Central Erongo Area.
The company holds 10 active tenements, each at varying stages of exploration advancement.
Elevate Uranium made four discoveries in four years.
With five drill rigs operating in Namibia for much of 2024, providing resources and testing the extent of recent discoveries, Elevate Uranium remains one of the most active ASX-listed uranium companies.
At year-end, three drill rigs worked on resource definition and increasing the Koppies’ resource confidence level. Two other rigs have been working at Hirabeb and Capri.
In the coming months, the number of drill rigs will be reduced at the Koppies resource as the emphasis shifts to bench-scale metallurgical work, leading to a U-pgradeTM demonstration plant.
In a statement in the company’s 2024 annual report, Elevate Uranium chairperson Andrew Bantock said they would apply the U-pgradeTM process through a bench-scale metallurgical test work program on bulk ore samples from Koppies.
Bantock said the results from this metallurgical bench-scale program will be incorporated into designing and operating a U-pgradeTM to inform the future assessment of project development options.
The company says it will continue to test the potential across other projects, including through the current resource and step-out drilling programs at Hirabeb and Capri.
In mid-November 2023, Elevate Uranium increased the Koppies JORC mineral resource estimate by 136% to 48 Mlb eU308, a 42% increase in the company’s overall Namibian mineral resource estimate.
In early December 2023, Elevate Uranium raised $10 million from domestic and offshore institutional investors, including specialist uranium and natural resources funds.
With this funding in hand, by March 2024, five drill rigs were operating across Elevate Uranium’s Namibian projects, three dedicated to increasing the drill density at Koppies, with the other two targeting discoveries and resource expansion elsewhere.
By early April 2024, ongoing drilling success saw the Koppies mineral resource estimate increase by 20% to 57.8 Mlb eU3O8, achieved at a meagre all-in Koppies project discovery cost of US$0.07 per pound.
This increased Elevate Uranium’s Namibian mineral resource estimate to 103.8 Mlb eU3O8 and its global MRE to 152 Mlb eU3O8.
In the last quarter of the year, eight test pits were excavated at Koppies to recover bulk ore samples from being shipped to Perth for a metallurgical bench-scale testwork program, applying the U-pgradeTM process.
Elevate Uranium’s second discovery is that the Hirabeb Uranium Prospect is part of the greater Koppies Project Area, covering an area of 545 km2, 38 km east to west, and 18 km north to south.
The 2023/24 drilling program identified four target areas for additional exploration, and the program’s second phase, now underway, is to confirm the extent of the main mineralised envelope to delineate and report a maiden resource later in 2024.
The initial phase of the drilling program at the Capri Project (EPL 7508) started in February 2024 after Elevate Uranium had resolved the land access issues that limited exploration activities.
The program consisted of greenfield exploration designed to confirm the continuity of mineralisation between drill lines that varied from 800 to 2,500 meters apart.
This infill drill program will reduce the spacing between drill lines to define the mineralisation outline better.
There are plans to drill at the Namib IV (EPL 7662), Arechadamab (EPL 6663), Amichab (EPL 7436), and Ganab West (EPL 7279) on targets identified from field mapping and airborne electromagnetic surveys.
At Marenica (MDRL 3287), numerous exploration targets have been generated from previous ground and airborne surveys.
Elevate Uranium also increased the professional team from four to 10 geologists (including 7 Namibians) and two metallurgists.
