Categories: Energy
Topics: General Energy

Labrador Uranium (CSE: LUR)(OTC: LURAF) Executive Chairman Philip Williams on Preparing for a Transformative 2023

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the Executive Chairman and Interim CEO of Labrador Uranium, Mr. Phillip Williams. Phil, always great to have you on. How are you today, sir?

Philip Williams: I'm well, Gerardo. How are you doing?

Gerardo Del Real: I am well. Thank you for asking. A lot to get to. Look, we talked a bit off air, and it looks like 2023 is going to be a commodity market for the ages. We have gold firming up. We have silver firming up. Copper breached $4.30 a pound this morning. It looks like it's primed to touch $5. Uranium equities are coming back to life. The spot price looks like it's a coiled spring ready to go, and Labrador has a busy, busy pivotal, I think, 2023 ahead of it. So I wanted to have you on to get an update on what's been going on and to get an update on what we should expect here moving forward.

Philip Williams: Sure. And, look, I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, you captured it in terms of what's happening in the commodities space. And uranium, I saw it a lot higher last year. I mean, obviously, it touched $60 early in the year. It came back, along with the general market. Everything was off in the second half of the year, but the coiled spring is probably the best analogy I can think about. And we've seen the time and time again, when uranium moves, it can move violently and quickly and higher and the equities go parabolic. So it's a very exciting time to be in the space.

Gerardo Del Real: Tell me about the recent results that Labrador published, and then tell me about how you're using that data for the 2023 work program. I mentioned that I think it's going to be a pivotal year for the company and the shareholders. Can you explain to everybody why?

Philip Williams: Yeah, absolutely, and we're very excited to have these results out. We did announce the completion of the program last year and we announced the CPS results, which is pretty typical in the uranium space. But today, we're announcing the actual uranium assay results, and they are impressive. It was a relatively small program with only seven holes; five of those holes targeted what's known as the A1 corridor, which is in between two of the existing resources. So, for your listeners that aren't as familiar, the main resource area at our property is called the C Zone, and we have sort of 10 million pounds of uranium there and 135 million pounds of the vanadium. And talk about vanadium separately, but it's having a bit of a moment now too and it adds a significant amount of value to our resource.

But there's a gap between those resources and those resources were drilled up by historic operators. There's a gap in what's known as this A1 corridor, and it's structurally very complex. We brought in some very senior structural geologists to advise us on locating these drill holes. So we drilled five holes within that A1 corridor. Three of them returned above resource grade and widths along that sort of 1.5 kilometer gap between the resources. So that's all very exciting. But one of the holes, we had two levels of mineralization, one up higher up, sort of in the 50 meters below down-hole level. And, again, that hit a meter and a half of 0.1 and 0.8 meters of 0.13.

But, more importantly, we let that hole run and we let it run into an area where we believe that the upper and the lower C Zone coalesce. So there's two zones and we thought that in this area particularly, those zones would coalesce and maybe give us a wider zone of mineralization. What we found was we had a package of mineralization going from 212 meters down to 280 meters with sporadic uranium mineralization, but in some places significantly higher grade than what we have in our resource. And the standout result there, again, small interval at 0.5 meters, but 0.31% uranium, which is very high grade and an order of magnitude higher than the resource grade, so very encouraging and it's definitely an area that we want to follow up on. And then along that trend going from east to west, we hit, again, as I said, resource width and above resource grade hit. So lots of areas to follow up, and that's really going to be the focus of this coming year's drill program.

Gerardo Del Real: Lots of data to process. I know you have a very, very skilled technical team. This is a huge mineral belt that I should mention isn't just prospective for uranium mineralization, but there's copper, there's vanadium. There's a multitude of commodities. Is there going to be any attention given to potentially a couple of exploratory holes targeting some of the other known commodity occurrences within the belt?

Philip Williams: Absolutely. It's a kind of multi-prong approach, and our team, you mentioned, a very expert team, are working through all the data right now to identify the drill targets. But I think there'll be a combination of drilling within that A1 corridor to try to see if we can tie the resource together in that gap area, testing new targets proximal to those resources, see if we can find additional positive mineralization in that area and then testing the wider property area for, as you point out, both uranium but also potential for IOCG copper targets. And the start of that work is going to happen with a district-wide airborne gravity survey, which we're going to announce very shortly. We're going to take a patch of the entire belt, something that's not been done before, and then the brains that we have on the technical side will interpret those results. And then we're looking to be in a position to ground through some of those areas that light up from that survey this summer.

Gerardo Del Real: Busy, busy 2023 in store. I'm excited for it. I want to thank you for coming on and taking the time, as always. I'm looking forward to having you back on again soon, Phil.

Philip Williams: Yeah. Thanks, Gerardo, look forward to chatting again.

Gerardo Del Real: All right. Chat soon.

Click here to see more from Atha Energy