Elevate Uranium adds 10km of uranium mineralised area to Koppies project

Elevate Uranium (ASX: EL8) has discovered a 10km mineralised zone northeast of its Koppies 2 resource, within its Koppies uranium project — one of its key uranium projects in Namibia.

The possibility of such a discovery was flagged last May when Elevate — formerly Marenica Energy — announced an initial inferred resource at Koppies of 23 million pounds of uranium oxide, with that announcement also identifying the potential to expand the mineralisation adjacent to the existing resource and to the northeast.

Elevate then in July organised a field trip to what it describes as “ground truth” the regional trend northeast of Koppies 2.

This area is now referred to as Koppies 3.

The radiometric anomaly had been identified during a 2008 airborne survey.

All five drill lines intersected uranium

Following that field trip, it was decided to drill five lines progressively along that radiometric anomaly, with the fifth of those carried out 10km northeast of Koppies 2.

All five drill lines intersected mineralisation greater than 100 parts per million uranium oxide.

Elevate managing director Murray Hill said a second rig has been mobilised to Koppies to accelerate the drilling program.

“The potential of Koppies continues to improve with every drill line,” he added.

At Koppies 3, as with Koppies 1 and 2, the uranium mineralisation is shallow and generally less that 10m from surface.

Change in strategy to different exploration plan

Before March this year, Elevate’s exploration strategy was to target palaeochannel hosted uranium, based on the hypothesis that uranium occurred only in such structures.

However, further drilling confirmed that there was uranium beneath and on the banks of the palaeochannels.

The discovery of basement hosted uranium mineralisation at Koppies 3, a least one 1km beyond the estimated mineral resource area, saw the company switch to greater emphasis on the potential for basement hosted uranium.

Mr Hill said the new mineralised area has the potential to “substantially expand” the Koppies uranium resource.