Elevate Uranium plans to begin a scoping study on its Marenica uranium project in Namibia later this year or early 2027, marking the project’s next step towards assessing whether its 53-million-pound uranium resource can support a future mining operation.
Managing director and chief executive Murray Hill said the company is preparing the study as it advances pilot-scale testing of its patented U-pgrade processing technology, intended to overcome a main processing challenge associated with Marenica’s shallow uranium mineralisation.
“We are building towards a scoping study, starting later this year, early next year on Marenica,” Hill said. Pasted text
The study would mark an important shift for Marenica from resource definition and processing testwork to an initial assessment of how the project could be developed.
Hill said Marenica has a resource of about 53 million pounds of uranium, while Elevate recently increased its interest in the project from 75% to 90%.
The company is advancing the study as it completes a five-stage pilot-plant programme for its U-pgrade technology in Namibia.
Elevate has completed the first four stages and is currently running the fifth, with results expected before the end of this year.
According to Hill, the first four stages have rejected about 88% of the original material, leaving only 12% to enter the leaching circuit.
The process has also produced an upgrade ratio of between six and eight times before the final processing stage.
Those results are significant to the planned Marenica study because the company’s development concept depends heavily on reducing the amount of material that must ultimately be chemically processed.
Marenica’s uranium occurs in shallow deposits containing calcite, which consumes large quantities of acid if untreated ore is subjected directly to acid leaching.
Elevate’s process is designed to concentrate and remove the calcite before leaching, potentially allowing the remaining uranium-bearing material to be treated using a simpler acid-leach circuit.
Hill said removing the calcite means the company would require substantially less acid and could avoid the slower alkaline-leaching alternative.
“So now we’ve removed the calcite. We’ve got no acid consumer in there. So we’re now going to an acid leach environment,” he said.
The company initially tested material grading about 80 parts per million uranium through the pilot plant so that the results could be compared directly with earlier laboratory-scale work.
Elevate has since excavated test pits to obtain material closer to the current Marenica resource grade of about 180ppm, which Hill said it would also process through the pilot plant this year.
The company expects uranium recovery to improve from about 79% in the lower-grade test material to around 85% when it processes the higher-grade material.
The results from the fifth processing stage and the higher-grade test material are expected to provide further technical information as Elevate prepares for the Marenica scoping study.
Elevate is also considering a relatively simple mining approach because much of the Marenica mineralisation occurs close to the surface.
Hill said about half of the resource occurs within seven metres of surface, while approximately 95% occurs within seven to eight metres.
The shallow mineralisation has already helped keep exploration costs down, with Hill putting the cost of drilling at about A$1,000 per hole.
Rather than relying on conventional drilling and blasting, Elevate is considering using a surface miner that would cut material in layers of approximately 400mm to 500mm before loading it directly into trucks for transport to the run-of-mine pad.
“We essentially don’t drill and blast. Surface miner, put it in a truck, take it into the ROM pad, put it into a scrubber and our process starts,” Hill said.
That potential mining method, together with the U-pgrade process and pilot-plant results, is expected to shape the development concept that Elevate takes into the scoping-study stage.
The planned study also follows Elevate’s move to increase its ownership of Marenica from 75% to 90%, giving the company greater exposure to the project’s uranium resource as development studies advance.
Hill said the increased interest added about eight million pounds of attributable uranium to Elevate while reducing the free-carried project interest from 25% to 10%.
“When you’re only 75% of it, then you’re putting 100% of the money into 75% of the value. So by increasing it to 90% … we just picked up eight million pounds,” he said.
According to Hill, the remaining 10% is held locally, a structure he said was appropriate as the project moves towards more advanced development stages.
Marenica forms part of Elevate’s larger Namibian uranium portfolio, which accounts for about two-thirds of the company’s global resource base. Hill put Elevate’s total uranium resources across Namibia and Australia at approximately 181 million pounds.
The company’s immediate milestones are completing the fifth stage of U-pgrade pilot testing, processing the higher-grade Marenica material, and starting the scoping study later this year or in early 2027.
The study will be the first formal step towards bringing together Marenica’s resource, shallow mining concept and processing technology to assess how a potential uranium operation could be developed.
