Special Report: GTI Resources will fast track maiden drilling at the Jeffrey project in Utah, propelled by successful early testing and the uranium market’s increasingly positive fundamentals.
The highly anticipated exploration drilling program at Jeffrey will now occur in the middle of June instead of July, GTI (ASX:GTR) says.
Jeffrey’s high-grade uranium and vanadium potential has already been confirmed. It is one of several projects held by GTI in the Henry Mountains region, part of the prolific Colorado Plateau uranium province which historically provided the US’ most important uranium resources.
The rapid advancement of this drilling was driven by the recent successful ‘gamma testing’ of historic open drill holes at two locations within the project area.
Numerous zones of mineralisation were intercepted, including 0.3m of 0.234 per cent eU3O8, says GTI.
This testing has also confirmed that the mineralisation continues beyond surface ‘outcrop’ and existing underground developments and will help refine GTI’s drill targeting for the upcoming program.
The GTI share price is up almost 500 per cent over the past month, driven by a confluence of factors.
Firstly, there’s the sense that uranium’s renaissance is now inevitable.
US-based players, like GTI, are also benefiting from moves to revive their local industry.
And the region itself also benefits from well-established infrastructure and a mature mining industry harking back to the early 1900’s.
The White Mesa mill, the only conventional fully licensed and operational uranium-vanadium combination mill in the US, is just down the road.
GTI is moving fast because there’s obvious potential to supply high-grade uranium ore to help fill this existing local mill processing capacity.
GTI director Bruce Lane anticipates the company’s high-grade potential and proximity to operating infrastructure “will strengthen the possibility of an early stage production outcome under the [Trump] regime”.
“The US is the world’s largest consumer of uranium with an annual demand in excess of 40mlbs (principally used in carbon neutral power generation) but with its domestic uranium mining and processing industry effectively killed off due to an extended period of sub economic uranium pricing,” he told Stockhead.
“The Trump administration has woken up and realised that the nuclear industry is strategically important to the US…..they seem very determined to regain global leadership of the industry and have identified domestic uranium mining as a fundamental part of their strategic plan.”
“We are drilling past producing properties with known metallurgy that are within trucking distance to the White Mesa Mill at Blanding in Utah (the only operational conventional uranium ore processing mill in the US).”
“Our clear objective is to define a resource that is economic to process through White Mesa.”
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