Elevate Uranium’s development programme across its Namibian assets enters a tightly defined operational phase between late 2025 and the end of 2026, driven by the rollout of the company’s U-grade™ pilot plant and parallel resource-growth work at Koppies, Namib IV and Marenica.
The U-grade™ demonstration plant completed its whole design, optimisation and construction phase in Perth in August 2025.
Once fabrication was finalised, the plant was shipped to Namibia, arriving in November 2025, where assembly and commissioning began immediately under the direction of Elevate’s senior metallurgist.
The first production test is scheduled for Q4 2025, marking the plant’s initial ore run with simultaneous data acquisition and technical analysis.
A second ore run is scheduled for Q1 2026, again accompanied by real-time analytical work to validate performance.
The plant’s function is to run Namibian calcrete-hosted uranium ore through the U-grade™ beneficiation process and produce a low-mass, high-grade uranium concentrate.
It does this by rejecting the upper 3–4 metres of barren calcrete and processing the deeper, high-sulphate ore zone to separate uranium-bearing minerals from gangue material.
During each ore run, the plant will record continuous data on mass yield, uranium recovery, impurity behaviour, moisture response, reagent consumption and overall concentrate quality.
These outputs will provide the definitive technical dataset required to calibrate the flowsheet, confirm ore response characteristics, and support the engineering and cost models for Elevate’s upcoming Scoping and Pre-Feasibility studies.
The pilot-plant programme is centred on the Koppies deposit, the flagship of Elevate’s Central Erongo pipeline. The resource is defined by its shallow geometry: mineralisation begins at the surface, with half of the total resource lying within 7 metres of the surface and 95% within 17 metres.
This depth profile supports a low-strip mining scenario. Koppies contains 56 million pounds of U₃O₈, complemented by a 10-million-pound U₃O₈ resource at Hirabeb.
Within a 50-kilometre radius of Koppies and Hirabeb, approximately 359 million pounds of U₃O₈ have been delineated by Elevate and other operators active in the district.
The U-grade™ process will treat Koppies’ high-sulphate ore while excluding the upper 3–4 metres of near-surface material, consistent with the flow sheet used to develop the technology.
Resource expansion and classification work proceed alongside the pilot-plant programme.
At Namib IV, drilling for a maiden mineral resource estimate is scheduled for Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, with follow-on exploration drilling running through Q1 2026 to Q4 2026.
The Namib IV campaign is designed to establish a third mineralised zone within the Central Erongo cluster and extend the overall resource base across Elevate’s contiguous licences.
Project-study milestones advance in parallel. The Koppies Project Study runs from Q4 2025 to Q2 2026 and provides the technical backbone for early development options.
The Marenica Project Study runs from Q2 2026 to Q4 2026 and draws on operating data generated by the pilot-plant programme.
Marenica currently hosts 61 million pounds of U₃O₈. A resource review is underway to apply a higher cut-off grade, and infill drilling to increase confidence in the indicated category is planned for Q3 2026.
Marenica ore will be incorporated into the second phase of the U-grade™ pilot-plant operation during Q1 2026, aligning process-response data with the broader study schedule.
Across the 2025–2026 window, Elevate Uranium’s programme brings together pilot-plant operations, resource growth, metallurgical validation and project studies under a coordinated timeline.
The sequence positions Koppies, Namib IV and Marenica for the next stage of technical and project definition within Namibia’s emerging uranium corridor.
