Categories: Energy / Mining Stocks
Topics: General Energy / Uranium Stocks

Premier American Uranium (TSX-V: PUR)(OTC: PAUIF) CEO Colin Healey on Positioning for a Historic Uranium Bull Market

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Premier American Uranium, Mr. Colin Healey. Colin, it's great to have you on, interesting times in the uranium space. First and foremost though, how are you today, sir?

Colin Healey: I'm doing great, Gerardo. Thanks a lot for having me on.

Gerardo Del Real: Listen, I want to talk Premier and the multiple catalysts and how positioned you are for the next leg up because you've done a great job of that, but I want to talk macro first. Some really, really fascinating developments in the uranium space here over the past several days. You have big, big global financial institutions –  Bank of Americas, Morgan Stanleys, Barclays, all have pledged support for nuclear power expansion to meet net zero targets by 2050, right?

Regardless of the politics and how people feel about it, the capital and the banks that are going to finance this are getting behind it in a very big way. Microsoft had some news here over the last week. Then, we have a couple of other sector specific catalysts that I think the markets and the equities are really picking up on and why we're seeing stocks up 10%, 15%, 20% over the past several days. That's a lot there, but I wanted to get your take on everything going on in the uranium space.

Colin Healey: Yeah, I mean it's a big topic, but for sure the last week and a half here has been incredibly interesting and really reflective of something that I've believed in for a long time. That is that to reasonably power the world's energy demand and also meet climate objectives you need to have nuclear power as a primary and growing component of the energy mix.

With the Microsoft news, you get more color or information about what big tech is thinking in terms of ensuring that they have power for their plans in terms of growth of cloud services and cloud computing. It's going to be incredibly energy intensive and they're being proactive in going out and making deals like with Constellation to restart the Unit 1 at Three Mile.

That's 835 megawatts or so of power and clearly going to be the beginning of a trend I believe where we see big tech out figuring out its own and being proactive about figuring out how it's going to power its data centers. I just think that's kind of one of the earlier signals of how incredibly impactful cloud computing is going to be on energy demand.

Given the climate goals of the COP28 Conference end of last year, 22 countries committing to triple nuclear power by 2050, I mean it's a staggering increase in global nuclear power and we're already in an under supplied environment for uranium. It's no surprise at all that the market is starting to look at uranium stocks more favorably. For many of us on the sidelines observing, it was hard to understand how uranium stocks were being treated for the last couple of months, but having been around the sector for a long, long time, I've watched the uranium price and uranium stocks move.

I just love the fundamental position that we're in right now where we're already under supplied. People ask me sometimes, "Okay, you're bullish on uranium long-term, but why now? What's the urgency?" I always tell them, "We're already under supplied. The existing reactor fleet needs more uranium than the world's producing." You've got this short-term, incredibly bullish thesis, medium and long-term bullish thesis. All around I just love the sector and that's why I'm involved.

Gerardo Del Real: I think you nailed it. For a lot of these big tech companies, nuclear is a need. Energy is a need. It is not a want. It is not something that they have much of a choice on. I think that's the part, as a contrarian, during this little consolidation that we've had for the past nine to 12 months or so in the equities, that's what's had me so excited because the fundamentals to me are clear as day. This is a trend that's going to be favorable for us in the space for years, not for months.

When I see a nine month, a 10 month, an 11 month consolidation and the consolidation in the spot price happens in the high 70s, low 80s and the equities are trading as if the spot price was in the 30 pound range, that's exciting to me if you have the liquidity and the timeline to be able to add. I mentioned this, but you've done a great job of setting up Premier for the next leg higher. Can we talk about some of the catalysts here as we close out 2024 and moving into 2025?

Colin Healey: For sure, I mean at Premier right now we've spent the summer in Wyoming primarily drilling our Cyclone Project. The objective there was to go out and drill about 37 holes between July and October. We're getting close to completion of that drill program. We put out results a few weeks ago now at the midpoint of the program with some really promising looking intercepts. The goal of the program to go out there and prove that historic drilling had merit. We didn't have all of the data for that drilling.

We're starting to build some of our own data. The driver of that exploration program was our 2023 NI 43-101 Tech Report that outlined a resource exploration target of 7.9 to 12.6 million pounds at Cyclone. With this program, we went out there and we drilled some holes 10 to 75 feet away from historic collars and intersected great grades. 

We've been able to intersect six and a half feet at 0.066% for a GT of 0.43. We have grades up to 0.085%, really promising in terms of reinforcing our thesis of why we're there, what we're trying to accomplish, and feeding some great data into the 2025 program. What you're going to get from us in the next couple of weeks here is probably a wrap up press release of drilling with the highlights from the remaining goals.

I'm hopeful that those will be stock catalyzing. In the meantime, we're over at Cebolleta where we just generated a new resource, a new 43-101 tech report, with the acquisition of that project with the acquisition of American Future Fuel. We generate a current resource of 23.5 million pounds, which is a big increase over the historic resource of 18.9 million pounds.

Importantly, back in March of this year, we applied for part three exploration or drill permits at the Cebolleta Project, New Mexico, and probably towards the end of this year we're going to be able to go out and drill a little bit there. We're not sure of the exact timing because we're still waiting on the finalization of those permits, but in terms of catalysts for the remainder of this year, we've got the final results from Cyclone, which I'm optimistic about.

Then, we've got the commencement of potential drilling in New Mexico. It should be a busy year of catalysts. On top of that, one of the fundamental pillars of Premier is this acquisition component. The founding pillars are acquire, explore, develop and we will be looking to be active on the acquisition front hopefully towards the end of this year or early next year, a bunch of different catalysts that could potentially feed support for the stock.

Gerardo Del Real: I know that jurisdiction is playing an ever increasing role in the companies that get premiums and premium valuations and, look, no question that Premier has been focused on that. Can you just briefly touch on the jurisdictional advantage that the company benefits from?

Colin Healey: Yeah, our focus has been US assets, particularly in New Mexico, Wyoming, and Colorado. New Mexico where we have that 23.5 million pound current resource is historically the fourth largest uranium district in the world, 347 million pounds of historic production. 37% of the US’s historic production. Our asset, Cebolleta, is on the Cebolleta Land Grant, which is private lands, which we believe is going to enable us to be more efficient at permitting in the future. 

So the permitting process should be simplified at Cebolleta because of the position of the project on private land looking for a really streamlined approach relative to areas that are on public land. As far as our Wyoming projects go, this is one of the most recently developed regions of the US. We've got multiple processing plants. We saw the transaction for the Sweetwater Rio Tinto assets in Wyoming. That processing plant isn't far from our Cyclone asset in Wyoming.

Wyoming historically produced 230 million pounds of uranium and it's got multiple licensed and operating production facilities, mostly entirely ISR focused at the moment, but we're 12.5 miles to the west of an existing producer. We're not far from the Sweetwater processing facility, which is part of that Rio Tinto asset sale. That plant, the acquirer's plan is to convert that plant or add to that plant the functionality process resonance from ISR facilities or from ISR satellite facilities.

With multiple processing plants operational within trucking distance of our project and transactions happening in Wyoming right now, it just underscores the strength of that jurisdiction specifically, which I consider one of the best in the US. Then, our Colorado assets, which are kind of secondary at the moment, our focus is definitely New Mexico and Wyoming, but Colorado has an extensive history of uranium production.

Within our assets, our Atkinson Mesa and Monogram Mesa projects both had around five million pounds of historic uranium production, over 20 million pounds of historic vanadium production. The best jurisdictions in the US in my opinion. That's where we are planning to focus our M&A activity to continue to build a portfolio of assets in these great jurisdictions at a time when I think that the US is going to start to further prioritize domestic energy security, which to me is going to include an increase in uranium production and investment in uranium.

Gerardo Del Real: I couldn't agree with you more. I think your timing is excellent. I'm looking forward to having you back on. Thanks again for your time.

Colin Healey: Thanks a lot, Gerardo. I appreciate your time as well.

Gerardo Del Real: Chat again soon. Take care.

Colin Healey: Thanks.

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