Welcome back, everyone. Next we have Ur-Energy. It trades on the New York Stock Exchange American under the symbol URG and on the TSX under the symbol URG. It's a uranium mining company operating the Lost Creek In- Situ Recovery uranium facility in South Central Wyoming. Happy to welcome CEO John Cash back to the conference. John, before your presentation, there's been a lot happening in the uranium world. Lots of good news. Can you comment on this?
Yeah, the last 24 hours has been a pretty wild ride in the industry. Even back the last week or two, we just continue to get a lot of great news, a lot of tailwinds in the global industry. In the last day, Sprott Physical Uranium Trust announced that they are raising US$200 million to use that to purchase uranium on the spot market. That really jumped up the equities, including our share price yesterday. We had a great run yesterday and are very pleased by that. It also resulted in nearly an 8% increase in the price for uranium on a per pound basis. That is great news as well. Beyond that, just globally, we see so much happening right now in the nuclear space. The World Bank, they have lifted their ban on funding for nuclear projects.
Japan has announced that they're going to grow their nuclear industry considerably. It looks like Spain's reconsidering their ban on material. President Trump has signed an executive order to quadruple nuclear generation in the U.S. in the coming years. A lot of tailwinds last 24 hours, especially though it's been a wild ride. We're glad to see that and hopefully the good news keeps rolling.
Perfect. The floor is yours whenever you're ready.
All right, great, thanks a lot, Anna. We'll jump right into the presentation and we'll leave some time for questions at the end as well. We always like to start off with a picture of our processing plant at Lost Creek. We are ramping up production there. It is an in situ mine located in the great state of Wyoming, which is where I'm sitting here today. What you see there on the right, those are drums of yellowcake that we've shipped. Our shipping rates, we just continue to ramp that up and shipping more and more routinely from production there from our Lost Creek facility. We always like to keep the attorney happy with our disclaimer. I might make some forward-looking statements during the presentation. I encourage everyone to do your homework, read our public disclosure and be aware. There is always risk in investing.
Do your homework. We have two flagship properties at Ur-Energy that we spend most of our time discussing. We also have other exploration projects. I'll touch on those a little bit later. For most of the presentation we'll focus on U.S. production from our Lost Creek mine and also the build out of our Shirley Basin project, our two flagships. Lost Creek has been in production since August of 2013. We've got some great years of production there. We've produced about 3 million lbs through 2024 and we're increasing on that daily. According to the EIA, which is a U.S. government agency that tracks production in the U.S., we are one of the largest producers of uranium in the U.S. It's a very small club and we are one of the leaders in that club.
That production that we have from Lost Creek, we are dedicating that to some long term agreements, a total of seven agreements that we have with major U.S. utilities and European utilities to the tune of about 5.8 million lbs over the next few years. That's plus or minus flex. We also have a lot of open room in our book so that if the price continues to increase, we've got room to continue to sell more pounds into the market. Would also point out that some of those contracts have a linkage to the spot price with a floor and a ceiling. So we're not isolated to just the long term pricing. We also have opportunity to see some excitement in the market and have that reflected in our sales price to some of those utilities. We have a couple of really good customers in Europe.
They love the product coming from in-situ mining in Wyoming. They love the stability of the jurisdiction. They also love that our production, since it's in-situ, has a very low carbon footprint. They prioritize production from those types of mines. We're happy to be selling to them as well. We have a great resource in the ground at Lost Creek. About 12.8 million lb resource at a grade of 0.048%. Above and beyond that, we also have a little over 6 million lb of inferred resource with an average grade of 0.043%. All of those numbers you can take a look at our technical report that's linked on our website if you want to do some more digging about the resource and how it's distributed.
Historically at Lost Creek we've been a very low cost producer and we believe we can get down to very low cost. As again, as we continue to ramp up production, we're estimating operating cost of almost US$17 a pound, all in mine site cost. Including development and capital, we're looking at about US$45 per pound. As we get ramped up to commercial levels, we have a lot of life left in that project, about 13 years of remaining life. That assumes we don't do any more exploration, which is unlikely. In fact, this summer we intend to go out and do exploration in some of the surrounding areas, including Lost Soldier, LC East and some of our other exploration areas. We've been very successful historically at finding pounds when we go out and explore.
If you take a look at our tech report, you're going to see that a lot of the mineralized zones have not been capped or terminated by drilling. That is where our geologists will be focusing this summer. We have a capacity at the mine at Lost Creek of 1.2 million pounds per year. That is what our license with the state of Wyoming allows. The mill that is attached to it, we are allowed to go up to 2.2 million pounds per year. We intentionally overbuilt the mill so that we could bring in ion exchange resin or unprocessed material from peers in the area or from one of our other projects. That decision was made way back in 2007. That capacity is completely built out at this point.
That is a good transition to our Shirley Basin Project because although we acquired that in 2013, we have got it fully permitted. It is ready to build out, and we are in the construction phase right now, but we intend to build that only as a satellite facility. We will take the unprocessed uranium from that facility and ship it over to Lost Creek to utilize that excess capacity in the mill. We have got plenty of room there to bring in those pounds from Shirley Basin. The resource at Shirley is about 8.8 million lb. It is all in the measured and indicated categories with an average grade of 0.23%. There is no inferred resource there because the drilling there historically has been very intense. The drilling is typically on 50-100 foot spacing. That is fantastic.
That means that we do not have to dedicate drill rigs there to doing exploration or, or delineation. We go straight into production. Right now we have four drill rigs contracted for that facility and drilling is going really well. We are constructing the drill pads, we are constructing the satellite facility. We have the compaction done for the cement, and we will be pouring cement here shortly. We have already got the power lines installed to the site. We have refurbished a number of buildings so it is a brownfield site and that really helps us out, minimizes the amount of work we need to do, but it also keeps the operating cost and capital expense fairly low. We are projecting operating costs there as we get ramped up to be a little over $24 a pound. Construction is on target, budget wise and schedule. We are looking to be done late this year.
Once construction is done late this year, we will move into a pre ops inspection with the state of Wyoming. We are projecting right now that in January we will be up to production. It will take a little while to ramp up to full production, but things are going great there. It is really fantastic to be bringing in situ mining back to Shirley Basin because that is where the technology was developed in the very early 1960s. In fact, they recovered over 1 million pounds, about 1.5 million pounds from that facility using in situ technology starting back in April of 1963. I have used the word in situ a number of times here and probably some people on the call are unfamiliar with that term. It is a Latin term, it means in the place.
We do not actually dig an open pit or go underground to access the mineral. What we do is we install water wells into the ore body. This picture here of our Lost Creek mine, Unit 1 well field, shows what the mine looks like. This is the actual mine that is recovering uranium. It is just filled with green grass and those little things that look like beehives, they are overpacks. We use them as wellhead covers. Those are the wells that we use to access the mineral. We inject water, oxygen, and CO2 into the mineralized zone and then we pump out the dissolved uranium to recover it. Very small environmental footprint. When we get done, we will simply reclaim the area and within a few years it will be impossible to tell that we were ever even there.
We'll take a little bit of a turn here in the presentation and just talk about nuclear power in general in the investing thesis. Really one of the big drivers and why the price is higher because demand is higher is because nations around the world are moving toward nuclear power. China is leading the way. They're going to nearly double their capacity by 2040. They will far exceed at that point the U.S., which right now is the largest consumer of nuclear power in the world. We get about 20% of oUr-Energy from nuclear right now. Globally there are 440 reactors in operation. There are 66 units in construction, 90 more on order, and well over 300 have been proposed. You can see the industry is growing rapidly as the world moves to decarbonize the energy sources.
That's before you even get to a discussion of a relatively new technology, or at least new implementation of that technology. With SMRs, that stands for Small Modular Reactors, we're seeing tremendous growth in companies that are planning to build those reactors around the world. These are companies like BWXT and Radiant, Oklo and many, many others that are advancing these. It is exciting. Here in Wyoming, not too far behind me where I'm sitting right now, TerraPower is actively involved in building out a reactor. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are involved in that project. We are rooting for TerraPower and their success here in Wyoming. The other big driver for nuclear power is big data. We're seeing tremendous growth in big data. The owners of those companies, they want green energy. They need baseload power.
They can't rely on renewables because there's no way to store a sufficient quantity of energy when the sun goes down or when the wind doesn't blow. They are increasingly turning to nuclear power. We're very proud of the fact that we are selling uranium to Constellation, and they will be utilizing uranium from our Wyoming operation for their crane facility that will be going into production here in the not too distant future. Some of that energy will be used for big data. We can't have a presentation on nuclear without talking about geopolitics because it is the tail that wags the dog. It's important for supply demand in the total market. It's always worth knowing that Russia is a big refiner of uranium. They do a lot of conversion and enrichment. Those are critical steps to produce nuclear fuel.
They are being essentially blocked out at this time by a lot of Western countries, including the U.S., so the West is increasingly turning to other supplies of uranium. That is very difficult. That is pushing the price up because the Western world right now just really does not have sufficient capacity to really keep up without a lot of planning, without sharing supplies. It is difficult. We are getting there step by step, but it has been a difficult process. When we look at global mining, Kazakhstan, which is immediately south of Russia, has a major influence. They produce about 46% of the world's primary uranium. They have been suffering from chronic shortages of sulfuric acid and mine delays. Their production, although it has climbed a little bit post Covid, is not reaching their target levels because of those chronic issues that they are facing.
They have also implemented significant new taxes and that is putting a new burden on some of the JV partners that they have. If you look globally beyond Kazakhstan and Russia, you look at some of the African nations, Niger in particular, Namibia, we just see a growing influence there by China and Russia. That supply has been called into question and that is causing uncertainty and that is also having an impact on the price of uranium. Here in the U.S. we are beginning to see a tremendous level of support from Democrats and Republicans for nuclear power, the two parties that get there for different reasons, whether that be green energy or national security. Nonetheless, we see tremendous support across political parties at this point.
Both political parties have a statement in their platform that they support nuclear and that's something I've not seen in my entire career and we're really glad to see that. Recently we've seen a ban implemented on imports of Russian low enriched uranium into the U.S. with limited exceptions. That was unanimously supported in the House and the Senate by both parties. We've also seen the consolidated budget allocate $2.7 billion for the Nuclear Fuel Security Act. We're seeing the benefits of that.
One of the things that will be coming out from the U.S. government before the end of this year we believe is contracts to enrichers to enhance low enriched uranium production and HALEU, which is high assay low enriched uranium production in the U.S., and what that means for us, Ur-Energy, as a uranium miner that's established and producing, they will be going out and purchasing uranium with a preference for domestic uranium to feed into that program. We believe that's going to be about 2.5 million lb per year over a term of five to six years. We stand ready to bid into that program. That's a bit of an opportunity that we have as a U.S. producer that most producers around the world don't have. Turning back to Ur-Energy, our projects are in green there and blue.
We have 11 years of production with 90% recovery. That's fantastic. We have a very low royalty burden and we have a lot of opportunity to grow the resource. A lot of area has not been drilled. Our picture of the facility right now, where do we stand? 19 drill rigs turning. We have two rigs at Shirley, four under contract. We expect two to be turning here this week. We've got great flow coming from the project, good head grade. The construction at Shirley Basin is going very well. Very pleased with that. Our efficiencies and our ramp up, where does that stand? We've commented a number of times on the need for personnel and advanced purchasing. I'm happy to say that both of those are going very well. The advanced purchasing, we're buying things a year to 18 months in advance.
As far as hiring goes, we have all the positions hired that we need right now. Very quickly, I'll just throw in a few pictures of our construction for Shirley Basin. There are a couple of ion exchange columns that have been completed and are ready for installation. Here is the plant pad at Shirley. The compaction is done and we will be pouring cement in July for that. You can see the drill rig working in Mine Unit 1 in the background. This is just south of Casper, Wyoming. We have also done some injection well testing. Here is one of our geologists working on that. We found that we have exceptional injection rates. We have refurbished three buildings, that is complete, and we have occupied those buildings as we work on construction of the plant.
On the green side, one of the things I'd like to point out is the very top bullet. Our production from Lost Creek and Shirley Basin compared to the energy generated from a similar coal fired system, we will offset more than 300 million metric tons of CO₂. We're very proud of that. This slide is just a few days old and it's outdated. A lot's happened in the last 24 hours. As I mentioned early on, our market cap now is nearly US$400 million. Our share price right now is about US$1.09. We are right now about 85% institutional held. It's worth noting that those institutions are some of the most sophisticated in the uranium space. They know us, they know global uranium miners and, and they select us as one of their holdings in their portfolio. We're really proud of that.
I think it's an indication of the value that we bring. We're a very liquid story. We trade nearly 5 million shares a day. For a few takeaways, we're very well financed. US$66 million at last report. We've got some good revenue coming in from those long term offtake agreements, RFPs from utilities, they do keep coming in. We continue to ramp up. We've got our people, we've got our contracts in place and as we bring Shirley Basin online, that will nearly double our production capacity. Right now, Anna, just a lot going on in the space, a lot going on at Ur-Energy, a lot of catalysts going forward. Never been a time that's been more exciting than right now to be in nuclear.
Wonderful. So happy that you can share this great news with us in real time right here, right now. John, talk a little bit about the shortage of drill rigs. As you mentioned, the uranium mining industry has kind of restarted. Give us an update on that issue.
Yeah, there have been plenty of drill rigs. It's been a shortage of people. Whether you're in Texas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, any state that mines uranium, there was a number of years where there was minimal work in the uranium space. A lot of the people left the drill rig industry. Starting in 2022, when the industry started to come back and we were kind of the leader in the U.S. on that, there was a severe shortage of people to run those drill rigs. We've had demand on those rigs now for three years. That supply is beginning to respond to that demand. We have more and more rigs coming into the industry. I'm happy to report, Anna, that we've got plenty of rigs now at Lost Creek. We've got plenty of rigs at Shirley Basin.
It has been a long time coming. It has been a struggle for us and our peers. It is basic supply, demand fundamentals. It just took a while for that supply to catch up with demand.
All right, President Trump initiated a Section 232 investigation into the national security implications of importing critical minerals like uranium. What's the outcome of this investigation?
Yeah, so that executive order was issued on tax day, April 15th. The Department of Commerce has 180 days to investigate the implications of imports of critical minerals, including uranium, on national security. They are already well into that investigation. They've been asking questions of suppliers and users of those materials. There are a number of potential outcomes, and there has been a Section 232 done before, and the outcome of that was some additional study. Also, the U.S. government purchased directly from U.S. suppliers, and we were one of the benefactors of that program, and we were able to sell 100,000 lb to the U.S. government. Potential outcomes would be tariffs, potential quotas, limiting imports from certain countries, direct purchasing by the U.S. government, and any number of other potential remedies that the Department of Commerce could come up with.
We expect that investigation and the report will be out October, and President Trump will be making final decisions on that, maybe around December, January in that timeframe.
Mike wants you to comment a little bit further about that. With that executive order, might there be increased barrier to entry into this business in general? Do you see it the same in other countries?
Yeah, the barriers to entry in the nuclear space, whether that's in the U.S., Canada, Australia, it doesn't matter. The barriers to entry are incredibly high. It takes a lot of technical expertise. You have to have the right property, you have to get your permits, which are incredibly difficult to get, even here in the U.S. Even though we have a very well established regulatory program. When we look at the Section 232 and the outcome of that, I believe one of the things we could see is alteration or a revision of the existing regulatory regime. Not that the review will be different, but perhaps more timely.
I would hope that that would actually be able to enhance uranium production in the U.S. from ourselves and from our peers by making it a better defined process and perhaps a quicker process going forward, not just for uranium miners, but for all critical minerals.
Katie asks with this executive order, does this enable you to obtain any government grants to assist in expenses?
That remains to be seen. That is very possible. That is one potential outcome, and we hope to know that by late this year. Fortunately, our projects are permitted and we're well funded, so we may not need to go out and look for any funding. That is a very possible outcome. It's also possible that this would get rolled into the Defense Production Act. Those two laws kind of go hand in hand, and we will see what President Trump decides to do. Certainly there is a severe shortage of critical minerals in the Western world, and that includes uranium. Right now in the U.S. we are still importing probably a little bit over 95% of the uranium that we use.
A lot of that uranium is coming from places that are not necessarily friendly to the U.S. or they are certainly under the thumb of Russia. It is a delicate situation. Anything President Trump can do to diversify that supply and get more domestic supply, I think would help improve national security.
Absolutely. Tyson asks if you can give a timeline to decreasing operating costs. Is it over the next 12 months?
Yeah. Great question. As we ramp up flow, we continue to maintain that head grade where we are. We're very happy with our head grade at Lost Creek. We expect as we go into this year, as we continue to ramp up production, love to get over 800,000-900,000 lb a year on an annualized rate. As we get into those ranges, our operating costs will come down fairly dramatically, and we'll be excited to be putting out our second quarter numbers, because we do continue to ramp up, hopefully that's somewhat responsive. Watch for our second quarter report. I think you're going to see some good things there.
Adrian asks, will you seek to acquire or bank more land and are you looking to acquire other listed uranium companies?
Yeah, we're always looking at M&A. We're fairly aggressive on M&A as far as the hunt goes, I can tell you that myself and our geologists, we spend a lot of time, we know pretty much every other player in the industry. We know their properties, we know their cost of production. We keep very close tabs, so we're always looking. I've always told investors that we are a pounds in the can story, not a pounds in the ground story. We're not promotional. Our promotion consists of production. We're looking for other companies, other operations that we can acquire that will add to that story. We do not talk about pounds in the ground, but we talk about how much we're going to produce. That's what we're looking for. We're going to be disciplined in that regard.
We will only acquire properties or companies that we believe contribute to that story. So, yeah, stay tuned. We will keep looking on M&A. we will look for opportunities, but again, we are going to be conservative on what we pick up. If we pick it up, it is quality.
JJ asks, in the future, will you be doing partnerships with the SMRs like Oklo?
Yeah, absolutely. As they come out and they are looking for uranium, we've got relationships with a number of those companies. They know us and they'll come to us and look for pounds. They like diversity of supply. They like US production as well. When they come into the market, we're on their list. Yes, we expect that we'll develop relationships with them going forward.
Tom wants you to comment on tariffs and how they're having any impact on production costs.
Yeah, very good question. I'll answer that, Anna, in two different ways. I'll answer on production cost. First, on production costs, we're really seeing no impact. We supply most of our equipment, instrumentation and so forth from the U.S. We were forced to make one change on instrumentation. We were buying from Germany. We switched to another company that's out of the U.S. so we could avoid those tariffs. That's behind us now. Otherwise, pretty much everything we buy is U.S. based, so it's had negligible to no impact on us. Let me talk a little bit too, about tariffs on uranium sales. Our contracts that we have with our European customers and U.S. customers pretty much all require delivery to them in the U.S. so they take over ownership in the U.S. so the impact from tariffs is zero.
I would also add that right now there are no tariffs on uranium anyway. Even if they were implemented, we deliver in the U.S. so the tariffs then would become the responsibility of the buyer. Right now we are in a great position on tariffs. We do not think it is going to have an impact on us.
Great news. Larry asks about the Shirley Basin. Is there a projection on production quantity in 2026?
We have not put out any numbers in 2026. We will ramp it up as quickly as we can. Any in-situ mine, there is always a little bit of a phase for tweaking and optimizing production, getting the pH just right, getting the chemistry just right. We do not expect to have grandiose production on day one. It will probably take a few months to get there. I will give a vague answer there and say we would love to have at least a few hundred thousand pounds from Shirley Basin next year. We do see tremendous flow rates and we also have very good grade in the ground. Hopefully we can marry those two up and have some really good production as we get ramped up, exceeding 900,000 lb a year.
Perfect. John, I want to give you about a minute to close for our viewers today.
Yeah, no, would ask the viewers. Take a look at Ur-Energy. Take a look at our website. We've got a lot of great information there. Our annual report is out. We have technical reports out on our properties. That distinguishes us from a number of our peers who do not put out technical reports or they do not put out economics. We're incredibly transparent. We believe we're very much undervalued right now. Please take a look at us. We're moving things right along at Lost Creek and Shirley Basin. We expect more good news throughout this year and into next year as we continue to increase flow and head grade. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Wonderful. Thank you, John. We look forward to continuing on this discussion with you. All right, everyone, we'll be right back with our next presenter.