TORONTO ? Within the halls of this year’s Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) mining conference in Toronto, Leigh Curyer was treated just like a star.
“It would be a lot of fun, but we’ve still got a much more work to do and much more things to achieve,” Curyer, the main executive of NexGen Energy Ltd., said in an interview.
Vancouver-based NexGen has been on an incredible run. The stock expires 38 per cent since March 3, when 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 is among the world’s best uranium finds in decades.
“The maiden resource blows street estimates right out of the water,” Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Rob Chang said inside a note.
That was just the beginning of what’s promising. On Tuesday, NexGen reported is a result of a drill hole that intersected 92 metres of very high-grade uranium. This hole was located outside of the initial resource, and Curyer claimed it is so strong that last week’s estimate has already been out of date.
“Many are telling me it is the best hole ever drilled in the Athabasca,” the 44-year-old said.
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NexGen’s roots go as far back to 2010, when Curyer, an old 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 1 after Fission Uranium Corp. made a major find nearby at its Patterson Lake South project in late 2012.
NexGen made its first big discovery at Arrow on Valentine’s of 2014. And since then, the deposit has gotten better and better. The organization only has spent about $26.5 million on drilling, but it already has a market capitalization of $390 million. (It had been $430 million before an overdue pullback on Wednesday.)
The NexGen and Fission discoveries are a couple of of the only bright spots in the global uranium industry, that has been in a horrendous bear market because the Fukushima disaster in March of 2011. Both firms have been 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 of the Athabasca Basin, an area which was largely ignored by most uranium companies as they thought (up to now) that better prospects lay towards the east.
It continues to be beginning at Arrow. The project 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 is shallow, it is entirely on land (instead of water), and it is hosted in very solid rock. Cigar and McArthur have far more challenging ground conditions, and also have faced water inflow problems.
“We simply could not have dreamed of hitting an origin as technically competent as Arrow is becoming,” Curyer said.
pkoven@nationalpost.com
Twitter.com/peterkoven
