Levi Single and his crew will mobilize equipment to the Pine Ridge uranium project north of Glenrock later this month, preparing to launch a massive exploration that could establish Wyoming's second-largest uranium resource.
"We'll probably get mobilized out about Friday before the 21st (of July) and get some pits dug and be ready to start drilling on the morning of the 21st," said Single, owner of Single Water Services in Glenrock, the Wyoming drilling company tapped to execute the 125,000-foot campaign in the Powder River Basin.
Single's four-man crew is a local piece of an ambitious, internationally connected campaign designed to prove up the Pine Ridge deposit. The partnership spans three continents, with Canadian company Snow Lake Resources teaming up with Australian firm Global Uranium and Enrichment Limited.
Single's team will drill holes 1,000 to 1,600 feet deep and work alongside Hawkins CBM Logging out of Cody, which will provide specialized geophysical services.
After each hole is completed, Hawkins will run sophisticated geophysical tools down on wire lines to analyze what's underground.
“They'll run it down there and it'll log the hole up, and then it'll read the resistivity and gamma rays," Single explained. "If the counts are high, then they know that they're right on the tip of the roll front.”
He was referring to the geological formations where uranium typically accumulates.
Global Reach
The Pine Ridge project sits at the center of an international uranium venture that stretches from Winnipeg to Sydney to Namibia's Skeleton Coast.
Frank Wheatley, CEO of Snow Lake Resources, explained how Wyoming fits into this global operation.
"Snow Lake Resources is a Canadian company listed on Nasdaq. We originally started as a lithium company several years ago, but given that the lithium market is depressed right now, about a year and a half ago we shifted our focus to uranium," Wheatley said, detailing what brought the company to Wyoming.
Earlier this year, Snow Lake entered into a 50-50 joint venture with Global Uranium and Enrichment Limited on Pine Ridge, while also holding a 19.9% equity interest in the Australian company.
"Against the backdrop of the new administration, over the past six months, they've put out a number of executive orders targeting both the nuclear industry as well as critical minerals,” Wheatley said. “And they've actually included uranium as a critical mineral.”
The Pine Ridge project covers about 37,000 acres in the southwestern Powder River Basin, positioned strategically near existing uranium operations.
It sits only about 9 miles from Cameco's Smith Ranch Mill, one of the largest uranium production facilities in the United States with a licensed capacity of 5.5 million pounds of uranium oxide annually.
Historical drilling by ConocoPhillips and previous owners totaled 1,214 holes, allowing development of a geological model that identified 335 kilometers of the geological formations most favorable for in-situ recovery uranium mining, the company says.
Under Australian mining regulations, Global Uranium has established an exploration target of up to 50 million pounds of uranium at Pine Ridge.
"If it was successful, that would make Pine Ridge the second largest uranium resource in Wyoming," said Wheatley, who hopes two drill rigs will be up and running by this fall.
Snow Lake's international reach extends beyond Wyoming and Australia. The company also operates the Engo Valley Uranium Project in Namibia, a historic property last explored in the 1970s, where the company hopes to complete an initial resource estimate by year's end.
"What a lot of people don't know is Namibia is the third largest global producer of uranium, following only Canada, which is No. 2, and Kazakhstan, which is No. 1," Wheatley said.
The U.S. ranks 14th, according to the World Nuclear Association.
The mining in Wyoming will be done using in-situ recovery, Wheatley said, a process that dissolves uranium underground and pumps it to the surface without traditional mining.
As for the exploratory uranium drilling kicking off in July, Wheatley said the objective is to complete enough drilling to calculate an initial mineral resource estimate by the end of 2025, focusing initially on the southern portion of the expansive property.
Future Technology
Snow Lake Resources said it is looking to expand its footprint across the nuclear industry and is talking about investing in the manufacturing of Small Modular Reactors — called SMRs — similar to what California-based company Radiant is talking about manufacturing in Bar Nunn.
Wheatley said Snow Lake has entered into a memorandum of understanding with U.S. company Exodys Energy to potentially develop the technology.
"We are looking at potentially developing an asset with small modular reactors based on current nuclear reactor technology," Wheatley said.
SMRs, as they are known, are bigger than microreactors, which Radiant wants to build in Wyoming, but still smaller than the commercial reactors now generating electricity at nuclear power plants in the U.S.
Will Snow Lake help bring SMR manufacturing to Wyoming?
“Wyoming is potentially on the list,” said Wheatley. “But there's a number of other states in the U.S. that are amenable to SMRs.
"The technical team is looking at taking existing, proven, permanent technology and scaling it down to a smaller size.”
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
