Inside The Investment Case: Elevate Uranium

In this episode, we sit down with Murray Hill, Managing Director of Elevate Uranium, to discuss the company's investment proposition, key project developments and the growing role of uranium in the global energy transition. From resource growth and project advancement to market dynamics and future catalysts, we explore what investors should be watching as the company continues to develop its uranium portfolio.

Guest Host: Lyndsay Malchuk, Global On-camera Reporter, Apaton  

Featuring: Murray Hill, Managing Director of Elevate Uranium 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're listening to the After Podcast, where mining meets capital, powered by one-to-one mining investment. Today we are coming live from our event in New York City. Please note this podcast is for information only and isn't financial advice or recommendation to invest. As always, the views you're here are those of the speakers.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Welcome back to Inside the Investment Case. I'm your guest host, Lindsay Melchak, coming to you right from the conference here in New York City. In a market where the world is searching for secure, reliable energy and governments are scrambling to meet ambitious electric electrification goals. One question continues to rise to the surface. Where is all the uranium going to come from? Today we're sitting down with a company that believes it has an answer. Elevate Uranium has built one of the larger uranium resources portfolios on the ASX, spanning Namibia and Australia, while also developing a proprietary technology that could significantly alter the economics of uranium production. Joining me is Murray Hill, Managing Director and CEO of Elevate Uranium. Murray, it's so great to have you on the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

Thank you. That was a big introduction. Good introduction.

SPEAKER_01 1:07

Well, I think my job here is done.

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Yeah, that's it. Well done. Thanks for that.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

So before we actually get into the investment case, for investors who may not have heard quite a lot about your story quite yet, why don't you give us sort of the 30-minute elevator pitch on about what the company is that you're actually doing.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

So do you want 30 minutes or 30 seconds?

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Um I'll do actually 30 seconds.

SPEAKER_02 1:28

Okay, let's go to the 30-second one. That's a quicker, easier one. The uh we're a uranium-focused exploration company, development company with operations in Namibia and Australia, as you pointed out, and we have this upgrade process that differentiates us from our peers. Right. So we think that yes, we continue to explore, we can do expand our resource base because we think we can add significant value by application of upgrade to those resources. So um we're in two jurisdictions that are fantastic. I mean, Namibia is the third largest producer of uranium, 50 years of history of producing uranium consecutively. Uh so it's a it's a great jurisdiction to be in. So it's nice to be in New York, nice to talk to you, and I look forward to your difficult questions.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

Very difficult. One of the things that really did immediately stand out for me is about your scale. You've built a resource base of roughly 175 million pounds across Nibia and Australia, which puts you in a very different category. When you look at the portfolio today, do you view resource growth as largely complete, or are there still opportunities to materially expand what you already have?

SPEAKER_02 2:31

Interesting question we ask ourselves. Um while, and I said to the board last week, yeah, while we continue to explore at and and and add pounds at 10, 20 cents per pound, while your own price is sitting at 85, and our market capitalization divided by pounds is something like 60 cents per pound, okay, it makes sense for us to continue and explore.

SPEAKER_03 2:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 2:52

And we know that like we're running the pilot plan on upgrade now, that's successful, then we know these pounds are worth a lot more than they currently are. So if it was costing us a lot, and we we stopped some expiration on a joint venture project in Australia because it's too high a cost per pound, in my view.

SPEAKER_03 3:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 3:07

So continuing to explore in Namibia and adding pounds just is adding to our value. I mean, most expiration companies, I mean, you've mentioned the number of pounds we got, and that's what most expiration companies are valued on. So the more pounds we've got, you'd expect our higher valuation.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

You know, that's also something that I think investors want to know is why you stopped, you know, your focus on one and put more on the other one. And you know, we don't get to see that in a pitch deck. So was there even more of a reason, or was that your main reason for pulling back a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 3:36

Yeah, look, between Namibia and Australia, they're very different countries and how they're approached. So in Namibia, it takes longer to get your license, but once you've got your license, then you can explore very rapidly.

SPEAKER_03 3:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 3:45

In Australia, you get your license very rapidly, but then you've got to go through all this approval process and red tape before you can get anywhere. And unfortunately, heritage issues are costing us a lot in Australian uh expiration at the moment. They're taking too long, they're just lengthening the time, lengthening the cost. So for us, yes, we continue to work on our Australian projects, but you don't see it because we're going through this prolonged negotiation process with on heritage and land access. Whereas in Namibia, that's not an issue. We're operating inside a national park in Namibia. Now, if you're in Canada where you come from, Australia, I come for a here, you'd be going, that's taboo.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

No.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

Namibia, 75% of its mining revenue comes from inside national parks. The national park we're dealing with gets 10 millimetres of rain per year. That's that much rain per year.

SPEAKER_03 4:27

My God.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

So it's not as though there's a huge number of animals or vegetation there, but at the same time, it's a desert, it holds its history, so we preserve it. So what we do is we real rehabilitate every hole we drill to make sure that you know the desert is left as we as we found it. But it is it's so much easier to work in Namibia right now. Um it's and we're getting much more success out in Namibia. So the fact that we've had four discoveries in a period of four years from 2019, three of those are now resources, one more to go, and that'll be next year. So that'll be a hundred percent conversion of exploration discovery to resource. You can't do any better than that. Yeah, absolutely. Um yeah, and it's costing us a thousand bucks a hole to drill.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Oh my gosh, it's nothing.

SPEAKER_02 5:08

And we've got five drill rigs working, they're drilling over 125 holes a week. Now you go into Canada, what is it, plus a hundred thousand just for one hole. So we're getting through a lot of holes, our resources are shallow, near surface. Um, so yeah, we so because the success is there, then it's easier to justify a decision to continue in Namibia. Right. And the inexpensive expiration and successful outcomes is one of the reasons why we continue to put most of our emphasis on that. But at the same time, as I say, we're working in Australia, it's just a slower process to get somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

So you made a point. I mean, you do work in two very different jurisdictions. Why in Namibia? What brought you to Namibia?

SPEAKER_02 5:44

Namibia is the I I got introduced to Namibia 2008 when I was consulting as a metallurgist, and um it just sort of thought, well, this is not a bad country to work in. Uh I was consulting to the company I work for now and uh with an idea about upgrade, and they offered me the job. It just makes sense, it's just it's a good place. The people are great. Right. I took my wife there for a holiday at the end of May for a week or so on a safari, and she absolutely loved it. Um that's the that's the great side of Namibia. That's a great side. But the the better side is the fact that we are dealing with a country full of people that really have a good sense of humour, have a good work ethic, and Namibia has the only the only country in the world with a dedicated uranium association. So that's the conduit between expiration, development, producers, and then the general public uh government stakeholders. And the fact that um sorry, I lost my train of thought there. There's so many good things to talk about in Namibia. I just worked which one, but uh I just it's it's just an easy country to work in, uh, and we have good relationships with government, they're easy to access. Oh, great. They're not above anything else, um, and they understand the value of uranium. Now, Rossing is what I was gonna say, Rossing this month, clock up 50 years of continuous production. Wow, that's no one else in the world's done that. So there's now two plus generations, depends how quick you breed, yeah, of Namibians familiar with uranium. So there's not the woke side that we see in Australia. They're not scared of uranium, they understand it. So, and the fact that you've got Rossing 50 years, then you've got three mines developed in the last 15, two mines approved in the last two years, there's a history of production, development, and licensing.

SPEAKER_03 7:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 7:27

So we're not the first. So we're coming into a country that's familiar with uranium. We're not going to a country that you're going to be the first to produce there, and it's going to be, you're going to have to really do a lot of hard work to get there. Absolutely. We don't have to do that. So there's a lot of companies before us that have made life easier for us.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Oh, that that makes it even easier then. Yeah. You know, despite everything that the, you know, this is what's very interesting to me, is that despite that resource scale that we talked about, Elevate continues to trade at a valuation that many investors would argue doesn't fully reflect the size of your opportunity here. When you speak with institutions and shareholders, what do you think the market is still missing about your story? I think so.

SPEAKER_02 8:08

When you take it back to when I started 14 years ago, we had a resource that was very, very low grade, and that's the only asset we had. We then developed upgrade to add value to that resource. So then we then it went for another, what, 2012, 2018 before we applied for a more ground. Because we were like, what are you doing? Of course the uranium price is dropping down to 19, 18 a pound at that stage. So we sort of pivoted and went, hang on, let's put control of our own destiny in our own hands by getting more assets in the country. So that was a big difference. And I think some people still remember that really low grade resource. Now it's only February this year we announced a resource update on that original resource. We doubled the grade. And we lost a few pounds in doubling it, but then we've also picked a lot of those pounds up in an announcement we made last week. So I think there's a bit of a sort of legacy of people saying, hang on, you've got this low-grade resource. But also, I get a question here. Um, how do you compare to Athabasca Basin in Canada?

SPEAKER_03 9:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

That's the highest grades in the world. It's also cost you half a million dollars to drill a hole in some of these. It costs us a thousand bucks to drill a hole. Our resource, like the copies resource, 50%'s within seven metres of the surface. So, I mean, you can understand what seven metres of the US, it's 21 feet. Right. It's not very deep. We're sitting above that now in this building on the fourth floor. So it's very shallow, so that it's it's um low cost to mine, and we think by adding upgrade, it's a low cost to process. So some people get a bit confused about the grades, but you look around Namibia, Rossing and Bean now, they're pit's down 450 metres. That's very, very deep. That's that's sort of some of the deep resources in in the Athabasca basin. But their grade is 300 ppm. Now, 300 ppm is nothing in Canada, but in Namibia, it's making money. So it's the cost structure, it's the it's the relative um distance from surface, it's it's shallow. And the the whole cost structure around Namibia versus versus Canada, and you know, we don't have the heritage issues that Canada have as well in Digital.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

Oh my goodness, it just never stops.

SPEAKER_02 10:12

Uh there's a lot of things to like about Namibia.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Absolutely. A lot of the uranium developers are are pursuing similar developments uh paths. Elevate has uh taken actually a different approach through its proprietary upgrade, really. Can you tell us a little bit about that technology?

SPEAKER_02 10:28

No, no, secret, can't tell you. Top secret. Top secrets. And it I hate to say it, but it's quite simple. But in developing it wasn't simple. Uh but what we do is we we counterintuitively we concentrate the game minerals, minerals without uranium, and throw them away. That's that's counterintuitive.

SPEAKER_03 10:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 10:47

Innovative and hence patentable, so we've got three patents around the world. So when we look at the ores, we looked and go, what's giving us the problem? We tried to concentrate uranium. Yes, we could get really, really high grades, but really low recoveries. Then we realised what was causing us issues, and then we focused on those and rejected them, or concentrated and then rejects. So it's a counterintuitive process, but it's using unit operations that are commonly used in gold, mineral sands, base metal plants. You used the word technology before, we actually go away from the use of technology because it's not a new technology, it's a new process.

SPEAKER_03 11:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 11:20

It's a process whereby we're using commonly used unit operations that any metallurgist can understand how to use. We just configure them in an unconventional manner and doing it reverse. Who thinks about concentrating gang and throwing it away?

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Right. Is it a more sustainable way to do things then?

SPEAKER_02 11:35

Is that well it's just it it's it's it's for us, it's the best way to go about it because we know it works in under Bench scale, and we're trying to prove that in the in the polar plant now. Uh so I'm heading back to Namera in in a couple of weeks' time for six weeks to sit on it because I'm the champion of the process, having sort of been strongly in in uh in well, I was the developer with a of the heap of other people in our technical steering committee. But we're confident it's gonna work, we just want to go and prove it, but it's not a complicated process, it's actually relatively simple. And when we explain it to a few people who have been inside the black box, explain it properly, yeah, they just go, wow, this makes so much sense. It just like, but you just don't think of it because it's counterintuitive.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Okay, fair enough. So you have a lot of momentum going forward, you have a lot of positive things that we've spoken about with every project, of course. We all know that it's not rainbows and butterflies all the time. What are the biggest challenges? Is it geopolitical? Is it financing? What is your biggest challenge right now?

SPEAKER_02 12:33

Um right now in Namibia is getting equipment into Namibia. Now, is that because of Nibbian? Uh look, it's a few delays getting into Namibia, but a few delays getting outside of the UK and Australia and so forth as well. Right. Uh someone asked me if it was due to the war, but no, it's not due to the war, it's just inefficiencies in the in the freight system.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 12:53

Um so that's frustrating me a little bit because when we see we want to make a change to the pilot plant, it's a four or six week delay. It's not like we're gonna do it tomorrow. So we're having to second guess ourselves what we think might be needed in the future. So we're ordering equipment that may be redundant because we want to make sure we've got it there when we need it. So that's sort of a bit frustrating for me. Um I've been asked what keeps you awake at night. Um hotels in New York and the fact that it never sleeps. Um aside from that, the jet lag, um nothing really.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

I mean that's good news.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

With the success in the expiration now, we've got five drill rigs working, as I said before. They're all getting six having success. Uh we're adding pounds to the Marineka resource, we're increasing the confidence level in the resource. We've got the upgrade process working, um, running through the pulp plant now, and hopefully in a few months' time we'll announce some good results out of that.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Amazing.

SPEAKER_02 13:44

And yes, Australia is slower than we want it to be, but we're still working on it.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Good. But well, why don't we flip over to the management team? Because you know, every great asset has to start from the top, obviously. So let's delve into that a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 13:56

Yeah, I don't want to talk about myself too much.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

Okay, don't talk about yourself white sweater.

SPEAKER_02 14:00

We have a we have a small uh but very effective management team.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Uh when you come above, you know, the minimum number of directors you need in an ASX company is three, and I'm one of them. So, and we got two executives on one of them. So we're not top-heavy, we're not a lifestyle company.

SPEAKER_03 14:15

Great.

SPEAKER_02 14:16

Um we've got a couple of management in Namibia, and we've got a lot of geologists in Namibia because we've got five rigs working. Um but yeah, we're we're seven people in Perth office. Um you know, we're 20 people in the Namibian office uh with the geos outside as well, and plus contractors, a number of contractors, and 45 Namibians working on the pilot plant. All no expats, all Namibians on the pilot plant. So look, it's um I think we're focused on what we need to do. We're also we challenge convention, we think outside the box.

SPEAKER_03 14:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 14:44

We developed upgrade by thinking outside the box and challenging convention, and I encourage our geos to think outside the box. I'm a metallurgist, so when I when geos get questioned by me, they sort of, I'm not coming from a geological perspective, I'm coming from a totally different perspective. So it makes them think differently. So I think it's I think it's just the culture we've developed of thinking outside the box and challenging what we do.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Are you fully financed right now?

SPEAKER_02 15:07

Um absolutely. 34 million Australian the bank, spending about one and a half million a month. A month. So we've got plenty of plenty of money to keep us going. So we're not under money pressure. So I'm not in New York asking for money, I'm in New York raising awareness of who we are and how good we are.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

Right. And how are you allocating that then?

SPEAKER_02 15:24

Well, pretty much 95% to Namibia because that's where we're having success. So the pilot plans obviously consume a bit of money. Uh the five drill rigs. Once we get the resource, the indicated status of Maronika, we'll pull back on the rigs and we'll go to our sort of fourth discovery and maybe do some drilling there to add that as the as a resource. But yeah, we're we're we're really focused on upgrade is a primary focus.

SPEAKER_03 15:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:47

But the upgrade team have nothing to do with the expiration, so we can continue that in parallel and really get the Marinega project advancing and then the copies project advancing.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

It's almost like you're running two companies simultaneously with your not technology, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:03

We'll say process, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

With your process and then the actual sites.

SPEAKER_02 16:07

Is that why I look tired?

SPEAKER_01 16:09

You don't look tired.

SPEAKER_02 16:10

Yeah, it looks look, it is, it is, uh, but that's the good people. The good people we've got in the company now, it enables you to do that. So it's never one person, it's always the team. And we've got a good team. And the team that are performing in the pilot plan are doing a great job. The team that's performing in the expiration program are doing a great job. So, yeah, it's it's there's there's one overseer, and that's me, but there's a team that do it.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

So when I see you next, whether it's Cape Town or whether it's New York again or wherever it is, what is one headline that you're like, this is the headline I want to be talking about?

SPEAKER_02 16:40

Pilot plan success.

SPEAKER_01 16:41

Power plan. And what are the catalysts that you need to hit to get to that?

SPEAKER_02 16:44

Yeah, so hopefully when I'm back there in in most of July, uh, that we get the results that I'm expecting to get. Um and once we get that, that's going to be a fantastic headline for us. Um at the same time, you know, that'll then lead into the Marinika um drilling results, the studies. So we we're waiting to finish the pilot plant. Well, not finish it, but get the first lot of results out of the pilot plant to then start feeding into a study before we commence that.

SPEAKER_03 17:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:12

But yeah, the pilot plan is the big one for us. And I think investors, we I've heard plenty of investors say it just sounds like a great idea, but you need to prove it.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

You have to prove it.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

We're proving it. And once we prove it, then they'll have no excuse but to push our share price up.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

That's right. Well, this has been a great conversation. There's a lot going on over there. I know that you know I'm definitely going to be watching on what's next for all of you. So thanks for sitting with us.

SPEAKER_02 17:34

Thank you. Appreciate the time.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Absolutely. I've been speaking with Murray Hill, Managing Director and CEO of Elevate Uranium. The company trades on the Australian Securities Exchange under the symbol EL8. To learn more, visit elevateuranium.com.au. Now, as the global energy transition continues to evolve, investors face an important question. Will the next generation of uranium producers simply be defined by the pounds they control or by the technologies or processes that make those pounds more valuable? That's a question worth considering. I'm Lindsay Melchik, your guest host right here in New York City. We'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 18:09

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