OKR - uranium tech partner permit renewed

Our North-American uranium development, exploration and enrichment Investment, Okapi Resources (ASX: OKR), has just announced a 5-year renewal of a permit for Ubaryon at its facility.

Today, the Australia's Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) granted a 5-year permit renewal to Ubaryon, enabling advancement of its uranium enrichment tech.

When we first invested in OKR earlier this year, we noted that some of the main reasons for Investing were the company’s 21.9% stake in Ubaryon (and its enrichment technology) combined with multiple USA uranium assets including a JORC-stage asset.

With the permit to now advance Ubaryon’s enrichment tech renewed, we see this as an endorsement of the technology partners progress

The enrichment market is valued at US$6BN and Russia currently dominates it (45% of it in fact).

As the US pushes hard to strengthen its uranium and nuclear fuel supply chains, we see OKR as well placed to benefit from strengthening macro tailwinds for uranium and uranium enrichment.

What’s next for OKR?

This is what we think the near-term newsflow for OKR will look like:

🔄 Drilling at Athabasca Basin

We expect OKR to drill its most promising projects in Canada in Q3 of this year.

🔄 Drilling at most advanced project in Colorado (which has a JORC resource)

A permit is in place for 18,200m across 60 drill holes - we want to see OKR firm up a timeline for this drilling.

🔄 Drilling at second Colorado project

At the Maybell project OKR has engaged a company called BRS Engineering to work over historical data - the company has direct experience at the Maybell Project when it was operating. We’d be looking for a drill program in H2 2023

🔄 Progress on enrichment tech

Scientific progress and regulatory approvals aren’t linear processes but we are looking for one of the following three things to happen on the enrichment front:

🔲 Further validation and extend the enrichment performance (show how well it works)

🔲 Achieve continuous operation at bench scale (scale up process)

🔲 Regulatory approvals

Read: Our latest OKR Note

Further reading: Our OKR Initiation Note