The arrival of the U-pgade™ demonstration plant marks the tail-end of Elevate Uranium’s current phase of work in Namibia — a sequence designed to move the Koppies Project from exploration into technical validation rather than immediate production.
The plant, scheduled to operate around late 2025, will take the company’s proprietary beneficiation process from laboratory bench-scale to continuous pilot testing, confirming how the technology performs on Namibian ore and providing design data for future commercial planning.
Once that phase is complete, Elevate intends to undertake the detailed engineering, environmental and economic studies required before any development decision.
While some in the industry view Koppies as a potential addition to Namibia’s uranium production portfolio before 2030, the company itself has not committed to that timeline.
For now, its strategy remains focused on de-risking — expanding resources, validating process technology and ensuring that when a Final Investment Decision eventually comes, it rests on sound technical and market foundations.
Elevate Uranium, formerly Marenica Energy, has been active in Namibia since at least the late 2000s through Marenica Minerals (Pty) Ltd, which holds the 75%-owned Marenica Uranium Project (MDRL 3287) in the Erongo region. The licence covers about 321 km² and anchors the company’s Namib strategy alongside newer discoveries at Koppies, Hirabeb and Namib IV within its Namib project area.
The company’s Namibian inventory grew by pegging and exploring its own EPLs rather than buying operating mines.
Koppies (EPL 6987) lies within the Namib Desert uranium corridor, approximately 65 kilometres northeast of Swakopmund and 20 kilometres south of the Langer Heinrich Mine. The deposit occurs in shallow, calcrete-hosted mineralisation within palaeochannels, making it highly amenable to low-cost surface mining. Elevate Uranium wholly owns Koppies and has been the flagship for the company’s proprietary U-pgade™ processing technology.
The U-pgade™ process is a beneficiation technology developed by Elevate to concentrate uranium minerals before leaching.
It works by rejecting carbonate-rich and silica gangue material from calcrete-hosted ore, reducing the mass that must be processed by 80–85 per cent and lowering acid consumption by 50–70 per cent compared to conventional leach circuits.
Pilot tests on Marenica and Koppies material achieved uranium grade increases of three- to five-fold while cutting downstream plant size and reagent use proportionally in practical terms, which translates into a potential 50–60 per cent reduction in operating costs and a markedly smaller environmental footprint—an approach particularly suited to Namibia’s surficial uranium deposits, such as Koppies and Marenica.
The deposit’s mineralisation extends over roughly 13 kilometres of channel length, and about 78 per cent of the current 66.1 Mlb resource is now classified as Indicated under JORC 2012, confirming strong geological confidence.
The Koppies resource currently stands at 55.9 Mlb U₃O₈ within the main deposit and 10.2 Mlb U₃O₈ at the nearby Hirabeb zone, taking the wider Koppies Project total to 66.1 Mlb U₃O₈.
Mineralisation at Koppies and Hirabeb remains open in several directions, and both are part of a broader system of surficial uranium enrichment stretching across the Namib Desert.
Koppies was the first of these Namib Desert tenements to be systematically drilled, culminating in an October 2024 upgrade that lifted the Koppies deposit to 55.9 Mlb U₃O₈ and, with a maiden 10.2 Mlb at nearby Hirabeb, took the wider Koppies Project to 66.1 Mlb. That same update put Elevate’s total Namibian resource base at 112.1 Mlb U₃O₈.
Hirabeb (EPL 7278) lies directly south of Koppies and covers approximately 730 km². It hosts the newly defined 10.2 Mlb U₃O₈ inferred resource and represents a high-priority exploration growth area.
Drilling has confirmed strong continuity of mineralisation, with uranium grades extending laterally into weathered basement zones adjacent to the palaeochannel network.
Namib IV (EPL 7662), discovered in 2021 and revisited in late 2024 after the Koppies workstream, has since returned broad mineralised envelopes up to 11 km by 7.5 km and is being drilled toward a maiden resource.
The company’s exploration model has evolved to include both surficial and basement-hosted uranium styles.
Elevate has occasionally added ground by acquisition.
In 2018, then-Marenica bought the Mile 72 Project from Metals Australia for A$30,000 cash plus a 1% gross production royalty — modest in scale but illustrative of how it assembled options around its core licences.
The significant Namib holdings at Koppies, Hirabeb and Namib IV, however, were secured through the company’s own applications and exploration.
Since 2024, the technical focus has been twofold: grow resources and prove up the U-pgade™ beneficiation route on Namib surficial ores. Bench-scale testwork on bulk samples from Koppies is complete, and Elevate has moved to a demonstration stage in Namibia.
The company says a Koppies U-pgade™ demonstration plant is scheduled to operate in Namibia around late 2025, stepping from bench work into continuous pilot-scale proof to inform design and economics.
Recent local reports flagged shipping delays but confirmed the pilot’s imminent assembly and commissioning.
To fund that plan and more drilling, Elevate raised A$25 million (N$312 million) at A$0.35 per share on 31 October 2025, lifting pro-forma cash to about A$43.9 million (N$548 million).
The placement was pitched to accelerate the U-pgade™ pilot programme, resource definition and expansion drilling across Namibia, and supporting technical studies.
How significant are the Namibian assets today?
On the public numbers: Koppies deposit 55.9 Mlb U₃O₈; Hirabeb 10.2 Mlb U₃O₈; total Koppies Project 66.1 Mlb U₃O₈; total Namibia 112.1 Mlb U₃O₈ (October 2024 basis).
The company also retains the legacy Marenica Uranium Project (MDRL 3287) resource of roughly 61 Mlb U₃O₈ (Elevate share ~46 Mlb). It is drilling Namib IV toward a first estimate to add to that 112.1 Mlb tally potentially.
