Marmota (ASX: MEU) has identified a new, high-priority uranium exploration target with significant potential from gravity data at its promising Junction Dam project in South Australia.
Intriguingly, the company’s target in the north-west corner of the project sits adjacent to where $1.94 billion market-capped budding producer Boss Energy has revealed its highest uranium grades from drilling at its Jason’s deposit. The revelation has arisen from the fourth stage of a review into the Junction Dam project being conducted by well-known uranium specialist Mark Couzens.
Management says Couzens used gravity imagery collected by the SA Government to identify potential extensions of the uranium-carrying Jason’s palaeochannel onto its side of the tenement.
We now have our first real understanding of the potential of the target area, and its priority targets.
Marmota chairman Dr Colin Rose
It says Couzens’ review had changed the company’s concept of the potential, scale and size of Junction Dam and it would now focus on a return to drilling at the project.
The NW corner of Junction Dam has always been a tantalising target. We now have our first real understanding of the potential of the target area, and its priority targets, next to the area that yields Boss’s highest resource grades. We are delighted with the imagery from the state gravity analysis when combined with the known palaeochannels, and with the potential for Marmota.
Marmota chairman Dr Colin Rose
The irregular boundary of Marmota’s exploration licence ground takes in two separate sections of the Yarramba Palaeochannel, which hosts Boss’ historic Honeymoon uranium project and its contained mineral resource of 36 million pounds of triuranium octoxide.
The Honeymoon project is a sandstone-hosted paleochannel deposit that was discovered in 1972 by a joint venture (JV) between Mines Administration, Carpentaria Exploration and Teton Exploration Drilling Co. The project lies just 13km south of Boss’ two Jason’s prospects – and Marmota’s new target area.
Honeymoon became Australia’s second operating in situ recovery uranium mine, kicking off production in 2011. But operations were suspended in November 2013, after difficulties reaching production targets, high costs and a falling uranium price.
The project was placed in care and maintenance, then passed through other hands until it was eventually bought from Uranium One by Boss and Wattle Mining – now a Boss subsidiary – in November 2015 for $9 million.
At about their closest relevant points, the two palaeochannel sections in Marmota’s ground are separated by a distance of about 19km. The bigger, south-western part, about a 17km-long stretch of the palaeochannel, encloses Marmota’s Bridget, Saffron and Yolanda prospects.
Together, they comprise an estimated exploration target of between 22 million and 33 million pounds at a grade ranging between 400 parts per million and 700ppm uranium oxide. The Saffron prospect, about 4km south of Bridget, has an inferred resource of 5.4 million pounds weight at a grade of 557ppm uranium oxide.
The three prospects are arrayed along a 10km stretch of the channel in Marmota’s ground, leaving plenty of room for other possible discoveries between them and at the north and south ends of the current string of prospects.
The much smaller north-western extremity of Marmota’s tenure – which was the principal subject of the stage-four review – also encloses a small section of the Yarramba Palaeochannel and is estimated to measure only about 4km by 4km within Marmota’s tenement. But importantly, the review area juts out into the channel zone to within as little as 2km away from Boss’ Jason’s and Jason’s South channel uranium targets.
Boss only recently completed drilling at its Jason’s prospect. Jason’s uranium resource numbers point to an inferred 10.5 million pounds at a grade of 790ppm uranium oxide.
That is a handy bit of free geochemistry right on Marmota’s doorstep.
The most interesting discovery arising from the review is an apparent bifurcation – or confluence – in the Yarramba Palaeochannel system. It shows the system splitting around a massive, interpreted gravity basement high that sits beneath both Marmota’s and Boss’ ground. It suggests a high probability for an extension, branch or tributary running into Marmota’s ground off the main ancient palaeochannel that carries the Jason’s mineralisation.
Tantalisingly, another parallel, linear, channel-like gravity depression of almost identical proportions is reflected in the gravity imagery, just 1.2km east of the new channel discovery.
Whatever happens with Honeymoon, it stands as a beacon in the centre of the other developing projects within its sphere of influence, especially at a time when the uranium price – for the first time since May 2007 – is powering the light.
And Marmota is well-placed to share in the glow.
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