A tiny exploration company from Canada has become the latest entrant to the once abandoned Shirley Basin uranium mining district in central Wyoming where it hopes to attract interest from larger players in the strategic ore market.
Indigo Exploration President and CEO Paul Cowley said that his Vancouver-based company recently acquired old uranium claims in a roughly 2-square-mile area that is sandwiched between ore-rich spots already in various stages of getting mined by larger uranium businesses.
“We are one of four or five uranium companies in the Shirley Basin now,” Cowley told Cowboy State Daily of the claims generally referred to as the Hot Property project.
Shirley Basin is located in Carbon County roughly 40 miles south of Casper.
Indigo, which also is involved in a gold project in West Africa, plans to re-drill several abandoned exploration uranium wells left over from the 1960s with the hope of determining the size of the ore deposits underground.
“This will now become our key project to work on,” Cowley said. “This will become our company’s new starting point. We are just determining their value.”
Red Hot In The U.S. Right Now
He said options for the uranium find in the Shirley Basin includes everything from developing the site to selling the claims to rivals at a higher price.
“It’s definitely too early to discuss this,” said Cowley, who wants to build value before even considering a sale.
“There’s interest in uranium there because prices of the commodity are up significantly due to the U.S. government looking for domestic sources,” said Cowley, who has a 45-year career in the mining industry.
Cowley has held a range of executive positions ranging from Australian-based mining giant BHP Minerals International LLC to several junior mining companies like Vancouver-based vanadium miner Phenom Resources Corp.
Indigo’s uranium claims are located adjacent to Texas-based Uranium Energy Corp., and other spots under development by Casper-based Ur Energy Inc. and Canada-based Nuclear Fuels Inc.
Also in the basin are Canada-based Cameco Corp. and Strathmore Plus Uranium Corp., a Kelowna, Canada-based company that is in the early stages of uranium development.
Strathmore Plus recently completed 100 exploration holes across a project area in the Shirley Basin.
These uranium companies are collectively rushing to Wyoming’s Shirley Basin, restarting long dormant operations in some cases, because of renewed demand for uranium as the United States weans itself off foreign sources.
The ore is used in the enriched uranium process needed to produce fuel for the nation’s nuclear power plants.
The U.S. is concerned about relying too heavily on foreign sources, especially since Russia already is a major fuel supplier, and worries have grown in the U.S. on overdependence should the fuel supply line get cut.
This has become a real concern as saber-rattling between the U.S. and Russia has grown over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Cowley said.
In-Situ Mining
Uranium in Wyoming is extracted through in-situ mining and does not produce tailings like those from underground or surface pit mines.
Ur-Energy, whose main in-situ mining operation is run out of the Lost Creek uranium mine in the Red Desert, a 9,300-square-mile high desert and sagebrush steppe located in southcentral Wyoming, is one of the state’s larger uranium players.
In March, Ur-Energy began work to open a second in-situ mining operation in the Shirley Basin about 130 miles to the east of Lost Creek.
“Shirley is coming along well,” said Ur-Energy CEO John Cash, who told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday that an update on the Shirley Basin mine project will be provided publicly in the near future.
Ur-Energy also runs a production plant at Lost Creek where hydrochloric acid is used to dissolve the mined uranium in the baking of the uranium, along with salt water that flushes the uranium off resin beads used to collect the ore.
Ur-Energy’s expansion into the Shirley Basin satellite project will nearly double Ur-Energy’s annual mine production capacity to 2.2 million pounds.
Shirley Basin Revival
The Shirley Basin mine, which Ur-Energy acquired more than a dozen years ago, has a place in uranium history.
The Shirley Basin mine was the birthplace of in-situ mining technology in the early 1960s, though it was suspended in the early 1990s due to low uranium pricing.
In-situ mining involves drilling with water derricks, not oil, that can go down a few hundred feet into a bed of porous sandstone where there’s a very thick layer of uranium deposits to tap.
In Lost Creek, there are more than 300 drill holes, many with well caps, throughout the mining area.
Clearly visible beside the holes are 6-foot-high cone-shaped mounds where a backhoe has carved out a rectangular-shaped hole in the ground to store water needed in the drilling process.
A network of water lines crisscrosses the landscape to send water out to rigs, then return a slurry with particles of uranium in the non-potable water to the production plant, where the uranium is turned into yellowcake, a type of uranium concentrate powder.
Bentonite clay, also mined in Wyoming, is used to help with the drilling, keeping the walls of the drill hole from collapsing.
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
