Categories: Energy
Topics: General Energy

Latitude Uranium (CSE: LUR)(OTC: LURAF) CEO John Jentz on Unlocking Value in a Uranium Bear Market

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Latitude Uranium, Mr. John Jentz. John, how are you today?

John Jentz: Gerardo, I'm great. How are you doing?

Gerardo Del Real: I am excellent. Thank you for asking. Let's get right into it. We talked a bit off-air. We have ourselves the kind of uranium bull market that a lot of us uranium bulls have been waiting for, frankly, since the Fukushima tragedy. And so it's definitely a sector that is violent to the upside. We know that the gains in the sector happen really, really quick relative to some of the other sectors. And look, we had a pretty frank conversation about Latitude and in the results being solid, but the share price not reacting yet. I would love to talk on the record about everything that Latitude accomplished in 2023, because I think you've positioned the company and shareholders really, really well for the next leg up.

John Jentz: Yeah, 100%. I mean, 2023 was a pretty good year. I joined the company, we acquired the Angilak property in Nunavut, the old property in the CMB is still there. We completed a 6,000-meter drill program at Angilak this year. We raised some money, so we're set for next year. The results on the ground at Angilak, everything went fairly well. The results, as everyone could see in the assay results are fairly well. We haven't published a new updated resource, which we've always said we're going to do at the end of next year, at the end of next year's drill program. But from our press releases of both November 7 and December 4, people can see from the cross sections in there, some of the historic drilling and where we've drilled, and they can see that in their section in the extension of the mineralization.

So we're growing the resources we said we want to do, and that's the plan for next year. And again, if we do that next year and the stock price doesn't show us some favor, we're going to have to look at some other options, including things like looking at a technical study, potentially a PEA, things like that where we can actually demonstrate the real value. I mean, this is a real resource, 43 million pounds at 0.69. It's the second highest grade globally outside the Athabasca. So I mean, this is a real deposit. It's been around for a while, and we just need to get that through the investor base.

Gerardo Del Real: You talked about a pretty aggressive drill program in 2024 and upgrading and updating that historic resource. How are you financed for that? How is that looking? I know you raised some cash here recently.

John Jentz: Yeah. Currently we have about $11.7 million, that's all Canadian, so we've got enough to run the company. We've got enough for a drill program for next year, and so we haven't finalized... We have this list of targets. The list has probably got 25, 30 names on it or 35 locations. And so we have to take the winter sort of January, I think February to reprioritize, take some of our learnings, see if that changes some of the rankings, and then get ready for sort of a late April, early May back to site and get at the program.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. John, anything else you'd like to comment on? I mean, I would love your take on what you're hearing in the uranium space because again, I think we're just getting going. I often use baseball parlance. I'm a big Cubs fan, and I'd like to say that I think we're in the bottom of the third inning of this uranium bull market. So a lot of runway left. Thoughts on that?

John Jentz: Yeah, if you want a baseball analogy, I might even say we're sort of in the first or second inning. We may not even be in the ballpark. You want a football analogy, we may still be tailgating at this point. The game hasn't even started. My view is that the spot price is going to do what the spot price is going to do, but long-term, I sort of think in sort of 5 to 10 year chunks, I think uranium has a 5 to 10 year bull market ahead of it. What that means in terms of the price, I'm not exactly sure, but when you look at the fundamental driver, there's supply, demand, there's reactors, restart, there's all this stuff going on, and it's all true.

But really when you take a step even further back from that, people need power and people need electricity. And so unless we're going to go into a world where you're going to start curtailing that, nuclear has to grow on the per capita GDP, which is the world that's growing on a person basis, that's fine. But if we want to get anywhere near any of these goals that all the governments and companies and NGOs around the world have for net zero 30, net zero 50, all these targets are out there, nuclear has to take, it's more than its pro rata because the only other green energies are wind and solar, which are great, but they're not there in terms of base load power for electricity generation. Are they getting there? Sure, there's developments every day and they're doing great stuff. That's fine.

And if you don't have hydro, if you don't have a river, well, guess what? You want to borrow a phrase, another phrase from back when interest rates were low, "Tina, there is no alternative. All roads have to go through nuclear to get there." So how quickly, how much, what's that mean in terms of supply, demand and over what years? I don't know. But when you look over a 5 to 10 year period, I think that price has to increase to reflect that.

Gerardo Del Real: Your price per pound, if we look at that historic resource, you have a market cap right now of 35 million. You have a historic inferred resource of 43.3 million pounds. You're growing that, your financed for an aggressive drill program in 2024. There's a pretty severe disconnect there, and I'm really, really looking forward to the re-rating there. John, always a pleasure. Have yourself a great rest of 2023 if we don't chat, and I suspect we're going to be chatting frequently in 2024.

John Jentz: Terrific. Look forward to it. Thanks Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Cheers.

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