The board of Australian firm Peninsula Energy has made a financial investment decision (FID) to restart uranium production operations in the US.
Peninsula Energy announced an equity raise of A$35m ($23.61m) to fund the restart activities at the Lance Projects (Lance) in Wyoming, US.
This includes a fully underwritten institutional placement of A$32m ($21.58m) and a share purchase plan (SPP) to raise an additional A$3m ($2.02m).
Developed by Peninsula Energy’s 100% owned US subsidiary Strata Energy , Lance is estimated to hold 53.7Mlb of U₃O₈. It is said to be the country’s only uranium in-situ recovery (ISR) project that is fully authorised to use the low-pH ISR recovery process.
Peninsula Energy managing director and CEO Wayne Heili said: “It is with a tremendous sense of excitement that we are advancing the Lance Projects back into production.
“Our team has put an enormous amount of work over recent years into the transition to a low-pH ISR operation and we will be confidently moving forward to production.”
The Australian firm plans to start uranium production at the Lance Projects in Q1 2023. Deliveries to existing customers are scheduled to start in Q4 2023.
The commercial uranium production at the project started in 2015. However, in July 2019, the alkaline in-situ recovery uranium operations were halted due to lower-than-expected recoveries.
In a press statement, Peninsula said: “Peninsula is in a strong position to provide new supply to the growing nuclear fuel markets as Lance becomes fully operational.”
