Kristie Batten: Elevate hits milestone as uranium pilot plant sets sail

One of Australia’s top mining journalists, Kristie Batten, writes for Stockhead every week in her regular column placing a watchful eye on the movers and shakers of the small cap resources scene.

Elevate Uranium (ASX:EL8) is one step closer to proving up its patented U-pgrade beneficiation technology on a larger scale.

Under the supervision of Elevate’s senior metallurgist Andrew Jones, and with the assistance of Fremantle Metallurgy, the company built its first U-pgrade pilot plant.

The completion of the fabrication and assembly of the plant was celebrated in Perth last week with a champagne toast.

“For many years, we’ve dreamt about it, and now the time has finally arrived,” Elevate managing director Murray Hill said during the event.

The U-pgrade was designed to upgrade surficial uranium ores and was developed on ore from Elevate’s Marenica uranium project in Namibia.

Testwork completed to date has shown the technology concentrated the uranium by a factor of 50 and increased Marenica’s ore grade from 93 parts per million uranium oxide to around 5000ppm.

The technology has the potential to reduce operating and capital costs by around 50% when compared to conventional processing.

“The whole process of U-pgrade is not about concentrating uranium. It’s about concentrating the gangue [waste] minerals and throwing them away, so that makes it counterintuitive,” Hill said.

“Hence, patentable, which is why we’ve got three patents around the world. 

“The Chinese are very good at reverse engineering pieces of kit, but they can’t reverse engineer a process like this, because of the know-how that we’ve established over a long period of time.”

The plant is being packed up to be shipped to Namibia this week. It is expected to arrive there in October, where it will be assembled on site.

Jones will be close behind, relocating his family to Namibia for six months to oversee the process.

Hill said Jones had designed the plant to be flexible for different ore sources.

The trial, which will process at least 60 tonnes of uranium material, is designed to de-risk the process prior to commercialisation. 

The results from operation of the plant are expected to confirm production of a low-mass high-grade concentrate, which will be used to inform design of a full-scale commercial U-pgrade plant. 

“We hope to be one of the most prepared companies leading into design of a full-scale plant than anybody else, because we’ve set ourselves up for it,” Hill said.

Uranium deposits advancing

Alongside the pilot plant work, Elevate will also kick off a study on its Koppies uranium discovery in Namibia, one of the world’s premier addresses for uranium development projects.

Paladin Energy’s operating Langer Heinrich mine and Deep Yellow’s shovel-ready Tumas deposit are within 35km of Koppies.

The company believes the U-pgrade process could significantly reduce Koppies’ capital costs, relative to other uranium projects in Namibia as it has the potential to process more of the ore and lower the strip ratio.

The Koppies project has a resource of 66.1 million pounds of uranium grading 192ppm.

Half of the resource is within 7m of surface, with 95% within 18.5m, which will make it very cheap to mine.

“Forget about ISR – just get your shovel and your wheelbarrow and start digging,” Hill said.

It also makes exploration cheap, with each drill hole only costing around $1000 each.

While Elevate is well-funded with $21.7 million in the bank at the end of June, the cheap, shallow drilling allows it to run multiple rigs in Namibia while advancing studies.

That strategy has resulted in four discoveries in Namibia since 2019, two of which are in resource.

A high priority for exploration for the company is the Namib IV prospect, which is 10km from the southern portion of the Koppies resource.

Intersections have included 1m at 300ppm uranium oxide from 1m; 1.5m at 730ppm from 5.5m; 3m at 606ppm from 3m; and 3.5m at 202ppm from 3m.

Exploration to date has identified a mineralised area spanning 11km by 7.5km.

Further step-out drilling is planned during this quarter to try to expand that boundary.

Drilling to establish a maiden resource will kick off later this year.

Elevate was also recently awarded a $112,000 grant to drill its Angela uranium project in the Northern Territory, which has an existing resource of 31Mlb at 1310ppm uranium oxide.

The grant will be used to drill three new targets in September and October.

At Stockhead we tell it like it is. While Elevate Uranium is a Stockhead advertiser at the time of writing, it did not sponsor this article.