Australia-listed Moab Minerals has completed the acquisition of high potential uranium projects in Tanzania, setting the stage for drilling to start in August or September.

Moab has acquired 81.85% of the shares in Australian propriety company Linx Resources, plus an additional 7.75% following the conversion of loans owing to Moab by Linx, bringing its ownership to 89.6%.

Linx is the 80% owner of certain prospecting licences comprising the Manyoni and Octavo projects.

“The fact that Uranex previously explored, and extensively drilled, the Manyoni uranium project from the early 2000s to 2013 assists the company greatly. There is a large volume of historic exploration data, including drilling data, that the company has access to that will effectively save the company a lot of time and money,” said MD Malcolm Day.

Moab is planning 60 drill holes to an average depth of 25 m to address historical assay reliability. It will also conduct bench-scale metallurgical testwork on a representative suite of bulk samples from the drill programme.

The work will be completed in 2024 and 2025.

In addition, Moab is planning to undertake an exploration drilling programme that is designed to locate extensions to the known mineralisation at Manyoni. This will be based on grid drilling on a 400 m x 400 m and 200 m x 200 m pattern around the known mineralisation. The Manyoni uranium mineralisation is at shallow depth, varying from 3 m to 15 m to the top of mineralisation, and flat-lying.

Moab has called for tenders from experienced drilling companies and is in the process of finalising a contract for a minimum of 1 500 m of PQTT core drilling with the option to drill an additional 1 500 m.

“The Fukushima disaster in 2011 had a dramatic impact on the uranium price, and thus most pre-production uranium projects worldwide were shelved. Given the current uranium price of circa $85/lb, Moab is in the right place at the right time to re-evaluate the Manyoni uranium project and to commence exploration on the Octavo uranium project,” said Day.

The Octavo project is adjacent to Rosatom’s Nyota uranium deposit.

Besides the newly acquired Tanzania uranium projects, Moab has exploration assets in Colorado and Nevada, in the US, and in Western Australia.