Marmota Energy Limited announced that it has entered into a second uranium partnership opportunity with Teck Australia Private Limited. This new agreement which also represents Marmota’s first expansion into Western Australia follows on the back of the Company’s highly successful and now advanced Junction Dam uranium joint venture in South Australia.
The new WA focused JV will give Marmota Energy access to 2,736 square kilometers of uranium prospective tenements in a well established uranium province. Under the terms of the agreement Marmota will undertake AUD 1 million of exploration expenditure over three years to earn 51% equity interest in the uranium rights across seven adjoining tenements, subject to the satisfaction of Traditional Owner requirements by December 2012. As part of the agreement Teck will be issued 500,000 ordinary shares in Marmota Energy, its first direct equity interest in Marmota and signalling the confidence by Canada’s largest mineral house in the South Australian mineral explorer.
The Rudall East project is located in the Rudall River and Paterson area of Western Australia. This is a highly prospective region for unconformity and sandstone hosted uranium mineralization. The Rudall East tenements are located nearby to the Kintyre uranium deposit. A comprehensive suite of pre‐competitive data supplied by the government provides a valuable head start to exploration.
Marmota’s exploration objective is to discover an economic‐sized Kintyre style uranium deposit, or the related sandstone hosted deposit type, similar to Marmota’s Junction Dam uranium project in South Australia. Previous exploration over the Rudall East project includes good quality Airborne Electromagnetic survey data acquired by the Federal Government as part of the ‘Onshore Energy Security Program. The AEM survey has delineated buried palaeochannels and unconformity contacts, both of which are important for uranium targeting in the project area.
Geoscience Australia considers that palaeo valleys within the Rudall Complex represent one of the most prospective exploration opportunities for uranium mineralization. A large proportion of the project area marked in orange is interpreted to have a high degree of certainty for significant uranium potential. The orange shaded region corresponds to a significant palaeo valley interpreted to run through the tenement package, from the southwest to northeast as shown in the map below.
Marmota plans to roll out the same exploration methodology over the Rudall East project that has proven successful at its South Australian uranium projects. Marmota’s exploration techniques have proven to be robust and coupled with the existing available good quality data, offers a significantly de-risked project opportunity.
The Rudall East Joint Venture is in line with Marmota Energy’s corporate strategy of creating shareholder value and reducing exploration risk by acquiring projects with high discovery potential or a known resource with significant expansion potential, located in mining districts. As well as Junction Dam, its project inventory currently includes iron ore and copper and gold projects in South Australia and gold exploration in Nevada in the United States.
