Name of the Project
Kayelekera uranium restart project.

Location
Karonga district, northern Malawi.

Project Owner/s
Advanced uranium developer Lotus Resources' 85%-owned subsidiary Lotus Africa.

Project Description
Kayelekera, currently under care and maintenance, successfully produced uranium in the past, having delivered about 11-million pounds of uranium to the market from 2009 to 2014.

An accelerated restart plan completed in October 2024 has promised positive operational and financial outcomes, assuming a long-term uranium price of $90/lb.

Under the plan, the life-of-mine (LoM) production target is estimated at 19.3-million pounds of triuranium octoxide over a ten-year mine life. Production of 2.4-million pounds of uranium is expected over the first seven years of operation.

Potential Job Creation
More than 600 jobs will be created in the local community. The project’s workforce is expected to expand as work progresses, ensuring that the mine restarts on schedule.

Net Present Value/Internal Rate of Return
The restart plan promises pretax and after-tax net present value of $439-million and $301-million, respectively, with pretax and after-tax internal rate of return of 80% and 66%, respectively. Payback should be achieved within two years.

Capital Expenditure
The October 2024 accelerated restart plan reduces initial restart capital through a phased approach by focusing on capital items essential to the restart, with the remaining capital expenditure (capex) continuing off the critical path to optimise operations and cost structure. 

As a result, the initial restart capex to first uranium production has been reduced to $50-million from $88-million.

Planned Start/End Date
In a statement issued by Lotus on October 8, 2024, it reported that the time to first uranium production had been reduced from about 15 months to between eight and ten months by phasing in the completion of nonessential site infrastructure, such as grid power and an acid plant rebuild, beyond first production.

Latest Developments
Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera officiated the relaunch of the Kayelekera mine on August 14 as the project entered its final commissioning phase.

The ceremony coincided with the processing of the first uranium inventory – about 
1 500 kg of eluted uranium, ready for precipitation, calcining and packaging.

"We continue to make terrific progress in commissioning the plant and increasing mill throughput, and we are on track to achieve steady state 200 000 lb a month – 2.4-million pounds a year – production in early 2026," Lotus MD Greg Bittar has said.

Works on expanding the tailings storage facility are also under way. 

The project now has uranium inventory ready for the last stages of precipitation, drying and packaging. Final plant commissioning, focused on control system automation of the drying and packaging circuit, is being completed.

Work on the tailings storage facility infrastructure – to form the foundation for future lifts to accommodate the ten-year life-of-mine – has been ramped up.

Operations are ramping up using about 300 000 t of stockpile ore, about three months of mill feed, while awaiting the transition to freshly mined material in the fourth quarter of 2025. Commissioning is now focusing on automating the drying and packaging systems, the steps required before yellowcake production can start. 

Approvals are also in place. Malawi’s Environment Protection Authority granted the environmental- and social-impact assessment certificate in early August.

Key Contracts, Suppliers and Consultants
Orelogy Mining Consultants (pit optimisation, mine design and production scheduling ore reserve); Gill Lane Consulting (mineral resource estimate); Merrill Ford Independent Metallurgical Operations (metallurgical/process design); Steinert (ore sorting); Nagrom (metallurgical testwork); Senet (process plant and infrastructure, and cost estimate compilation); SLR Consulting (tailings and water); Mine Technics (openpit); SLR Consulting (plant); InfinityCorp (financial model); Dhamana (community and environment); and Mine Earth (mine closure plan and cost estimate).

Contact Details for Project Information
Lotus Resources, tel +61 89 2000 3427 or email info@lotusresources.com.au.