Elevate Uranium Ltd says its proprietary U-pgrade™ Demonstration and Pilot Plant has been successfully assembled in Namibia, with commissioning and operator training nearing completion and steady-state operations expected to begin in late January 2026.
The company said the pilot plant was transported from Australia and assembled in Namibia, where commissioning is being carried out under the supervision of senior metallurgist Andrew Jones, who relocated to Namibia to oversee the process.
During commissioning, Elevate Uranium has been training 40 local personnel to assist with operating the plant, while verifying that all mechanical, control and process systems operate as designed.
Steady-state operations are scheduled to commence after the Christmas and New Year holiday period.
According to managing director Murray Hill, the pilot plant will operate on ore from the Koppies and Marenica uranium projects in Namibia.
The primary objective of the pilot programmes is to validate the U-pgrade™ beneficiation process on a continuous operational basis at a commercially scalable size.
Data and process metrics generated from the pilot plant will be incorporated into technical studies for both the Koppies and Marenica projects.
Elevate Uranium holds a total mineral resource portfolio of 161 million pounds of U₃O₈ across Namibia and Australia.
In Namibia, its assets are located in the Erongo uranium province and include the Koppies Uranium Project, with a JORC 2012 mineral resource of 66.1 million pounds of U₃O₈, and the Marenica Uranium Project, with an attributable JORC 2012 resource of 46 million pounds of U₃O₈.
In Australia, the company holds tenements and joint venture interests that together contain 48 million pounds of uranium resources.
These include the Angela, Thatcher Soak and Minerva project areas, as well as joint venture interests in the Bigrlyi, Malawiri, Walbiri and Areva projects.
The U-pgrade™ process is Elevate Uranium’s patented beneficiation technology.
Bench-scale test work on samples from the Marenica project has demonstrated the potential to concentrate uranium by a factor of approximately 50, increasing grades from about 93 parts per million to around 5,000 parts per million U₃O₈, reject about 98% of gangue material before leaching, remove acid-consuming minerals and reduce capital and operating costs compared with conventional processing.
