Projects

South Texas Regional Strategy
 
Uranium Energy Corp’s regional strategy in South Texas is focused on consolidating assets along the re-emerging South Texas Uranium Belt.

UEC controls a portfolio of uranium projects along this belt, including the Palangana in-situ recovery project, which is ramping up initial production, and the Goliad in-situ recovery project which is in the final stages of mine permitting for production. The Company also owns the fully licensed and permitted ISR Hobson processing plant, which is central to all of its projects in South Texas.

By utilizing the Hobson facility as a central processing site, the Company’s eliminates the need to construct a new processing plant on site at each project.

The Texas Uranium Belt

The Texas uranium belt extends along an approximate 300-mile belt that extends from east-central Texas to South Texas.  This area holds significant known resources that are amenable to low-cost in-situ recovery.

With the use of historical exploration databases that document decades of South Texas-focused uranium exploration and mining,  UEC has been able  to target properties for  lease that have already been the subject of significant exploration and development by senior energy companies in the past. The Company will continue to aggressively pursue this formula on an ongoing basis, thus providing a diversified pipeline of advanced, development and exploration-stage properties for expanding production for many years

Texas is America’s energy capital, and the state with a unique streamlined permitting framework for uranium mining.  Texas has four operating nuclear power plants and six additional facilities are under consideration. 

In-Situ Recovery (ISR)

Today, in-situ recovery of uranium accounts for about 30% of global uranium production in districts where uranium deposits meet very specific geological requirements, including a permeable sandstone host.

UEC’s focus on developing ISR amenable uranium projects is a strategic one since this method of uranium extraction generally requires lower capital and operating costs and shorter construction and permitting time lines as compared to conventional uranium mining methods.

The ISR process is the most environmental friendly method of uranium mining and essentially reverses the natural occurrences that deposited the uranium in the sandstone. Specifically, on-site ground water is fortifi­ed with gaseous oxygen and is introduced to the uranium ore body through a pattern of injection wells. The solution dissolves the uranium out of the sandstone host rock. The uranium-bearing solution is recovered from production wells and then pumped to recovery ion-exchange columns. This pattern of injection and production wells, plus surrounding monitor wells that serve as a safeguard, is called a wellfield.

The subsequent ion-exchange process involves removing the uranium from the pregnant wellfi­eld solution and loading the uranium onto millions of synthetic resin beads. When the resin in an ion-exchange column is loaded to capacity, it is transported to a processing plant for stripping, fi­ltering, drying, and packaging into marketable yellowcake.

This process of uranium extraction was initiated at the Company’s Palangana ISR project in South Texas on November 17, 2010 making UEC the newest emerging uranium producer in North America.

For more information on ISR mining, visit http://uraniumenergy.com/uranium/in_situ_leach/