Elevate Uranium’s long-awaited first pilot results have shown that its U-pgrade™ technology can remove 88% of the material mined at its Marenica Uranium Project while keeping 79% of the uranium, an important test of whether the technology could eventually make the Namibian project cheaper to develop and operate.
Put simply, if 100 tonnes of Marenica ore entered the process, about 88 tonnes of mostly unwanted material could be removed before the main uranium extraction process, leaving only about 12 tonnes to be processed further while retaining most of the uranium.
That matters because the less material a future mine has to process, the smaller and potentially cheaper its uranium processing plant could be.
The results are the first from Elevate’s pilot plant and cover four of the five stages of U-pgrade™, a technology the company has spent years developing to make its relatively low-grade uranium deposits more economical to process.
Earlier tests had been carried out on a much smaller laboratory scale. The pilot plant is intended to show whether U-pgrade™ can produce similar results when equipment is operated continuously and at a larger scale, bringing the technology closer to the conditions required at a commercial mine.
The first results show that it has so far broadly matched those earlier tests.
Marenica ore entered the pilot plant containing 89 parts per million of uranium. After the first four stages removed most of the unwanted material, the uranium concentration rose to 590 parts per million, while 79% of the uranium in the original ore remained.
This means Elevate increased the uranium concentration about seven times before the material even reached the fifth and final concentration stage.
Managing director Murray Hill said translating the laboratory results into a working pilot plant had been one of the important uncertainties surrounding the technology.
“The answer to the question – ‘does U-pgradeTM work?’ was never a binary answer. We knew that U-pgradeTM would work, we just weren’t certain how the results from the bench scale testwork would translate to a Pilot Plant,” Hill said.
The company said some operating problems emerged as the pilot plant was commissioned, but its team in Namibia has addressed them, and all five stages are now operating.
Why removing 88% matters
A conventional uranium processing plant would normally have to handle much more of the material coming from the mine before uranium can be extracted.
U-pgrade™ is designed to remove material containing little or no uranium much earlier in the process.
At Marenica, the first stage removed 47% of the original material, the second removed another 23%, the third removed 2%, and the fourth removed another 15%.
By the time the ore reached the final uranium concentration stage, only about 12% of the original mass remained.
This could become important when Elevate calculates how much a commercial Marenica mine would cost to build and operate because processing less material means smaller equipment and lower requirements in later stages of the plant.
Elevate says the biggest potential benefit could be in the part of the plant where uranium is chemically extracted from the concentrated material.
Marenica’s ore contains carbonate minerals that make conventional acid processing difficult. Without removing those minerals first, the ore would normally require a different process involving temperatures above 92°C and treatment lasting between 24 and 36 hours.
The fourth stage of U-pgrade™ removes much of that problematic material.
Elevate says the remaining uranium-bearing material can then be treated with acid at normal temperatures for about four to six hours instead.
That could eliminate much of the energy required to heat the material and sharply reduce the time it must remain in the processing plant.
The company estimates that the shorter treatment time alone could make this section of a future plant about six times smaller for the same amount of production.
One important test remains
Elevate has not yet proved the performance of the complete U-pgrade™ process at pilot scale.
The fifth and final stage is designed to concentrate the uranium further and was commissioned in August. Results are expected during the fourth quarter of 2026.
This is important because earlier small-scale testing produced uranium concentrate grading about 5,000 parts per million uranium oxide after all five stages.
Elevate has cautioned that the pilot plant has not yet achieved this figure.
The company must now show whether the final stage can reproduce that result while operating as part of the larger pilot process.
Hill said the first four stages had achieved a seven-times increase in uranium concentration, similar to what Elevate achieved at the same stage during its earlier tests. In those earlier tests, the fifth stage subsequently increased the concentration by another six to eight times.
Marenica study starts next year
There is another reason the results could improve.
The ore used for the current tests was excavated in 2012 and contains 89 parts per million uranium. Elevate deliberately used the older material to compare the pilot plant directly with its previous laboratory tests.
Since then, additional exploration has increased Elevate’s estimated grade for the Marenica uranium resource.
The company has collected samples representing that higher-grade resource and plans to put them through the pilot plant in another testing campaign. Elevate expects uranium recovery could be higher when the richer material is processed.
The immediate focus, however, is completing and optimising all five stages of U-pgrade™.
Elevate expects to have the complete pilot plant operating steadily during the fourth quarter, then use the results to help design the Marenica project and estimate how much it could cost to build and operate.
A Marenica scoping study is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2027.
