Energia kicks off expanded drilling program at Nyang project

/in /by

THE DRILL SERGEANT: Energia Minerals (ASX: EMX) has commenced a program of 10,000 metres of aircore drilling at the company’s 100 per cent-owned Nyang uranium project in the Carnarvon Basin of Western Australia.

The drilling program is expected to continue until the end of November and follows the company’s recently announced $2.3 million capital raising and the strategic investment by fellow uranium company Uranium Equities (ASX: UEQ).

The drilling program has been doubled in size from the 5,000m the company had originally planned and is primarily designed to increase the current Inferred Mineral Resource at Carley Bore of 13.8 million tonnes at 390 parts per million for 12 million pounds uranium (at a 200 ppm cut-off).

 

Nyang project showing location of Carley Bore Inferred Resource,
historic drilling, palaeochannels interpreted from gravity surveys and
planned drilling. Source: Company announcement

 

“This is the largest drilling program undertaken by Energia in its relatively short history, and should go a long way towards unlocking the potential of our extensive tenement holding along the eastern margin of the Carnarvon Basin uranium province,” Energia Minerals managing director Kim  Robinson said in the company’s  announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange.

“We have already established a sizeable JORC-compliant Inferred Resource of 12 million pounds of uranium at the Carley Bore deposit, having effectively tested just 5 per cent of the prospective palaeochannels within the tenement holding.

“We have a lot of unfinished business in this area, with an additional Exploration Target of 15 to 25 million pounds of uraniuum and an extensive area of untested palaeochannels that require drilling.”

The other major tenement holders in the Carnarvon Basin are Paladin Resources (ASX: PDN) with 24 million pounds of uranium at its Manyingee deposit and Cauldron Energy (ASX: CXU) with 4.8 million pounds uranium at its Bennett Well deposit.

Energia considers the uranium at Carley Bore to have potential to be extracted by In Situ Recovery (ISR), a low-cost extraction technique with low environmental impact that is used worldwide.

As with previous drilling programs, the company indicated it will use a wet geochemical analytical method, rather than the conventional down-hole gamma logging technique, to estimate uranium content and will report the results as they come to hand.