Goyder goes hunting for uranium elephants in Alligator Rivers

Having presided over world-scale discoveries like Kathleen Valley (lithium/Liontown) and Gonneville (PGE-nickel-copper/Chalice) by companies in his stable, Tim Goyder wants to find the next Jabiluka or Ranger uranium deposit.

Both were world-class high-grade deposits in the Northern Territory’s Alligator Rivers uranium province (ARUP).

The use of the past tense there is deliberate as Jabiluka and its 142,000t of uranium has been locked away by ERA/Rio Tinto to respect the wishes of traditional owners, and the Federal Labour government.

Ranger started out with 130,000t, most of which was mined by Rio Tinto subsidiary ERA over the years, with the project now in rehabilitation mode.

Jabiluka and Ranger were/are so big that the resource was expressed in tonnes rather than the usual pounds. Convert the deposits to pounds and apply the current contact uranium price of $UDS80/lb, and their in-the-ground value is off the charts.

So finding another Jabiluka or Ranger is a noble cause for Goyder’s 19.58% owned junior explorer DevEx (ASX:DEV) which has its Nabarlek project in the ARUP as its main focus in a broader uranium exploration portfolio.

That DevEx it is trading at 7.9c for a market cap of $35 million says it has a long way to go in its ARUP hunt (it also owns a big ionic rare earths project in Queensland). But like all of the Goyder companies, at least it can be said it is having a crack.

Nabarlek is a good place to start because DevEx’s ground encircles the deposit of the same which was mined by the long-gone Queensland Mines in the space of four months in 1979.

It was small (24 million pounds was produced) but its high-grade (1.84% or 40.4/lbs a tonne) meant it was something special.

DevEx’s 2025 exploration field season in the Top End has just got underway and drawing on past work it will focus on a number of priority fault systems, including the Nabarlek, U40 and Angularli corridors.

New large-scale uranium targets called Big Radon and KP Prospects to the south and north of Nabarlek have attracted a $160,000 grant from the NT government’s collaboration program in support of a maiden drilling program.

And back at the Nabarlek itself, a better understanding of the characteristics unique to the rocks that hosted the uranium mineralisation at the historic mine has given rise to a mapping program in the broader area to find drill targets where the rocks may be repeated adjacent to the Nabarlek fault.

DevEx outlined its 2025 field season plans in an ASX announcement on Thursday. That it was well received was reflected in the 7.9c share price referenced previously as it was up 1c or 14.5% on the day.

Investor sentiment towards uranium stocks took off last month when Canada’s Sprott Physical Uranium Trust (SPUT) raised $US200 million for more physical uranium purchases. It was double the $US100m originally intended.

Traders pushed the spot uranium price 10% higher in June to $US78.50/lb to front run price increases that SPUT buying could trigger. But the strategy hasn’t panned out as the traders hoped, with uranium prices since coming back to $US72/lb.

Not to worry, the thematic that nuclear power is part of the solution to global warming is very much intact, as is the need to incentivise new uranium mines with higher prices to meet increasingly higher nuclear power growth scenarios.

Challenger:

After the hard slog in the early years of its Latin American gold/copper adventure, Challenger Gold (ASX:CEL) is finding things have started to move in its favour with a rush.

Challenger made Latin America its focus in 2019 with the pick-up of the Hualilan gold project in Argentina and El Guayabo gold-project in Ecuador.

Progress at Hualilan had stopped in the 15 years before Challenger’s arrival due to ownership disputes and El Guayabo had been over looked as a big but (typically) low-grade porphyry project after Newmont walked away from its early promise.

Since making the projects its focus, Challenger has grown Hualilan to a 2.8Moz gold equivalent resource and El Guayabo has become ranked as a 9.1Moz gold equivalent deposit (6.9Moz gold equivalent attributable to Challenger).

Currently all that is locked up in a company valued in Thursday’s market at $165 million (7.5c a share). Momentum is now clearly to the upside, with cash of $32m in the bank to maintain the pace.

Hualian is being prepared for a low-cost toll milling operation as a pathway to funding a larger standalone development previously scoped at 141,000oz gold equivalent annually at an AISC of $UDS830/oz.

A preliminary feasibility study in to the stand-alone project is in the works and will reflect the kicker of higher gold prices, and the recent confirmation that material previously classified as waste could juice up the project with the addition of a heap-leach operation.

At El Guayabo thoughts have turned to monetising the asset. It is more suited to a mining major with deep pockets and does not fit with the high-grade and more manageable opportunity back in Argentina.

Earlier this year China’s CMOC acquired Canada’s Lumina Gold and its 26Moz gold equivalent Cangrejos project for $US419m or about $A25 per resource ounce.

Cangrejos sits less than 10km from Challenger’s El Guayabo. Apply the same $A25/oz metric to Challenger’s stake in El Guayabo and out pops out a $175m figure. Whether that sort of value is realised in Challenger’s monetisation efforts remains to be seen.

But given the imputed $175m exceeds Challenger’s current market, is an interesting metric to ponder. As an aside, CMOC has noted that Cangrejos is its first move into gold in a big way. It is best known for its moly, tungsten, niobium, cobalt and copper interests.

The other factor that has swung Challenger’s way in recent times is the arrival of libertarian Javier Milei as Argentina’s president in December 2023. He has turned the country on its head as he chainsaws his way through government-imposed impediments.

Currency controls have been removed. The corporate tax rate has been cut to 25% from 35% and there is now legislated support for the mining sector and others. Investors are switched on to all that meaning Challenger no longer has to spend a good chunk of its presentations defending Argentina as place in which to operate.