Finance News Follow us to find the latest Finance news
TORONTO ? In the halls of the year’s Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) mining conference in Toronto, Leigh Curyer was treated like a star.
“It would be a large amount of fun, but we’ve still got a much more try to do and much more items to achieve,” Curyer, the chief executive of NexGen Energy Ltd., said within an interview.
Vancouver-based NexGen has been on an incredible run. The stock expires 38 per cent since March 3, once the company announced an initial uranium resource of 201.9 million pounds at its Arrow project in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin. The resource included an enormous high-grade zone of 120.5 million pounds, that has convinced some analysts that it’s among the world’s best uranium finds in decades.
“The maiden resource blows street estimates away from the water,” Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Rob Chang said in a note.
That was just the start of the good news. , NexGen reported is a result of a drill hole that intersected 92 metres of very high-grade uranium. This hole was located outside the initial resource, and Curyer claimed it’s so strong that last week’s estimate has already been out of date.
“Many are telling me it is the best hole ever drilled within the Athabasca,” the 44-year-old said.
Related
- Hope for brand new bull market in metals springs eternal at PDACSeafloor mining no longer science fiction and investors want on boardMidas Letter: PDAC 2016 reveals investors are slow to obtain aboard with rising commodity prices
NexGen’s roots date back to 2010, when Curyer, a former executive at Uranium One Inc., said he started hunting for uranium projects in the Athabasca Basin. He considered Arrow the company’s second-best target, but it quickly became number one after Fission Uranium Corp. made a major find nearby at its Patterson Lake South project at the end of 2012.
NexGen made its first big discovery at Arrow on Valentine’s Day of 2014. And also, since then, the deposit has got better. The organization only has spent about $26.5 million on drilling, but it already includes a market capitalization of $390 million. (It was $430 million before an overdue pullback on Wednesday.)
The NexGen and Fission discoveries are two from the only bright spots in the global uranium industry, that has been in a horrendous bear market since the Fukushima disaster in March of 2011. Both firms happen to be able to raise significant capital, which implies that good projects could possibly get financed in the worst commodity markets.
The discoveries lie around the west side from the Athabasca Basin, an area that was largely ignored by most uranium companies as they thought (until recently) that better prospects lay to the east.
It is still beginning at Arrow. The work has a long distance to visit before it can be considered within the same class as McArthur River and Cigar Lake, the Athabasca’s top two uranium mines. But Curyer noted it has a few advantages over most Athabasca projects: It’s shallow, it’s entirely on land (instead of water), which is hosted in very solid rock. Cigar and McArthur have far more challenging ground conditions, and have faced water inflow problems.
“We simply could not have dreamed of hitting a resource as technically competent as Arrow is becoming,” Curyer said.
pkoven@nationalpost.com
Twitter.com/peterkoven
