The Australian Securities Exchange-listed company recently announced its exit from an exclusive joint venture agreement with Ablation Technologies, a deal that had Black Range acting as a financial partner in developing an ablation system for processing sandstone-hosted uranium deposits. 

A dissolution of the JV agreement has left both parties with separate 100% interests in the technology, enabling the development, marketing and utilisation of it.

“We had been pushing to have a greater input into the day-to-day management and the day-to-day development of the technology,” Black Range managing director Mike Haynes told Australia’s Mining Monthly. 

“The outcome that we’ve negotiated in order to have that is for us to be able to develop this technology in our own right so we can now control the speed with which the technology is developed, and the processes and where it’s deployed.  

“We’ve got a huge competitive advantage immediately because we have taken ownership of all of the equipment that has been produced by the JV to this point to develop ablation.”

The ablation technology involves the use of two specially designed injector nozzles which fire streams of slurry made up of water and crushed uranium ore into each other to break apart the course sand grains from their uranium coatings, creating a very fine, concentrated uranium product which is easily screened from the sand.

The process offers the potential for a raft of savings and efficiencies to operators, negating the milling circuit usually involved in the traditional processing of uranium.

According to Haynes, the traditional process of crushing the ore, milling it into even finer particles and passing it through a leach tank to dissolve the uranium out of the rock is made simpler with ablation.

“In this case [using ablation] we’re reducing the amount of material that needs to go into a leach tank by about 90%, and the efficiencies of the acid working on that material that goes into the leach tank is a lot higher,” Haynes said. 

“So you have cost savings there by needing less acid and less time in the leach tanks, and importantly, once you’ve leached that material, the material that has to be discharged into a tailing stand at the back-end is only about 10% of what would conventionally be discharged into a tailing stand under conventional mining or processing methodologies.”      

The process has been tested using dozens of sandstone-hosted uranium deposits from around the world and, under Black Range’s stewardship, is set to take the next steps to commercialisation through field trials of a 5 tonne per hour capacity unit. 

“We’re just in the process now of mobilising that 5 tonne unit to the Sunday mine which is owned by Western Uranium,” Haynes said.

Canada’s Western Uranium Corporation approached Black Range in January with a takeover offer for 100% of the company, with Western noting the complementary nature of the two companies’ Coloradan assets. 

Black Range is developing the advanced stage Hansen/Taylor Ranch uranium project which hosts the largest uranium resource in Colorado and the third largest deposit in the US.

The merger implementation agreement offered one Western Uranium share for every 750 Black Range shares, representing a 106% premium to Black Ranges’ last closing price before the offer. 

The deal, which is expected to be finalised around mid-year, will lead Black Range to conduct the field trials of the 5tph unit at Western Uranium’s Sunday uranium mine, also in Colorado, which has been tested and demonstrated to be amenable to the ablation process.