Core Energy Minerals may soon be the newest producer in South Australia’s Tier 1 uranium district, which hosts mainstays like BHP’s Olympic Dam and Boss Energy’s Honeymoon.
Core has signed option agreements to acquire up to 100 per cent of two uranium projects in the region, which comprise a total of three exploration licences between them.
The Cummins and Harris Greenstone projects cover a combined area over 2300km2, with historic drilling at Cummins revealing a similar size to Alligator Energy’s 17.5-million-pound Samphire uranium project.
“The Cummins project in particular provides Core Energy with multiple advanced drill ready targets, based on historic exploration which shows widespread, shallow palaeochannel hosted uranium mineralisation over distances of greater than 10km3,” Core executive director Tony Greenaway said.
“As historic exploration was limited to regional 1km spaced drilling, there remains strong potential for high-grade mineralised zones of significant strike length to be delineated from the significant historic intercepts.
“The company plans to validate this historic work with some initial shallow drilling before undertaking a more systematic exploration drilling campaign across the wider project area.”
Core expects to begin drill testing priority areas at the Cummins project within the first half of 2025.
While the Harris Greenstone project is less advanced than the Cummins project, it is located in a region of SA which hosts multiple world class uranium projects, including Olympic Dam, Honeymoon and Quaser Resources’ Four Mile uranium mine.
“Geophysical data covering the Harris Greenstone project highlights a significant network of palaeochannels across the project,” Greenaway said.
“We are eager to get on the ground in South Australia, where the Cummins project has targets ready to test, while we advance our other earlier-stage assets.”
Cummins lies south of Core’s already-owned graphite project in the centre of the Eyre Peninsula, which comprises six exploration licences and contains a current JORC resource of 6.22Mt at 4.8 per cent total graphite content.
Other prospective projects in Core’s portfolio include:
- the Douglas Canyon project in the US, where the company is targeting million-plus ounce gold-silver deposits
- two uranium projects in the highly prospective Erongo region of Namibia, which neighbour some of the world’s largest and most prolific uranium deposits
- a uranium and rare earth project in Brazil, where the company is in talks with the Brazilian Government for the development and production of nuclear materials