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LONDON (Alliance News) - Aura Energy Ltd said on Monday a resource upgrade at its Tiris Uranium project in Mauritania has exceeded expectations providing the "potential for more than 17 years mine life".
There was an increase in the overall resource to 52 million pounds triuranium octoxide, 17 million in the Joint Ore Reserves Committee measured and indicated categories and "good resource continuity".
The 52 million pounds of total resource is a 6.1% increase. And the 17 million pounds triuranium octoxide includes 10.5 million pounds at 325 parts per million triuranium octoxide in measured and indicated resource at 200 parts per million cut-off grade and 6.3 million pounds at 469 parts per million triuranium octoxide in measured and indicated resource at 300 parts per million cut-ff grade.
Shares in Aura were up 7.1% to 1.50 pence each Monday midday.
"This resource upgrade has exceeded our expectations in many ways", Executive Chairman, Peter Reeve said. "Our objective was to upgrade approximately 7 million pounds of contained triuranium octoxide to the measured and indicated categories, so the achievement of 17 million pounds has exceeded this by a wide margin providing potential for more than 17 years mine life."
"The resource contribution from our new exploration area Hippolyte South was very encouraging as was our resource experts highlighting the orebody continuity, an important aspect for our future development plans. Pleasingly this upgrade study only covered part of the original resource so further increases in the Measured and Indicated categories are possible in the future."
"Aura has again moved this important project forward and will now be in a position to have the full Exploitation Permit granted by the government. It's a great achievement all round," he said.
In a separate announcement, Aura that the technical review and corporate work on the Haggan Vanadium Battery Metals Project in Sweden is progressing, which is set to culminate in an IPO for Haggan Vanadium on an undecided stock exchange.
The project contains many significant battery metals including vanadium, cobalt, nickel, zinc, neodymium, molybdenum and uranium, and has an inferred resource of 13.1 billion pounds of contained vanadium oxide.
In addition, a detailed test work program is under development which involves the review of previous test work completed in the 2012 scoping study, and will use material from existing drilling programs to investigate options for integrating vanadium processing technology with base metal recovery from the bacterial heap leach.
The test work aims to increase the efficiency of vanadium recovery, reagent consumption and energy requirements to keep the process at low cost.
Aura said that it will "monitor any vote" about the recently outlined Swedish government agenda which includes a motion to remove uranium from the Swedish Minerals Act as parts of the country's long term de-nuclearization and re-focus on renewable energy sources.
The company said its "development emphasis" at Haggan is on vanadium and other battery group metals the potential changes "do not diminish the relevance of the project's uranium content".