he folks Michael from Geo invest insights bringing you another review so I'm an exploration geologist with 10 years experience and at the moment we're going through a review of several different uranium companies there's been an absolute spike in the uranium price as of late it's currently dipping off a little bit but I am looking for a company to make a small uh investment on the ASX in um we've previously covered off covered off on a junior Explorer Mota we've covered off on Boss energy as well which have an in recovery um uh Sandstone hosted uranium deposit in South Australia and now we're going to be talking about Paladin energy uh and you have to forgive me as we go through this uh I have a habit of pronouncing Paladin as Paladin and uh some people are very particular about the pronunciation of the word Paladin uh so my brain might revert back to Paladin as we go and if it does just excuse me and forgive me uh let's just start off by taking a look at the um uranium price at the moment so when we started covering and talking about the uranium boom uh we were really up around here up around the $100 a pound mark and um since then that was only a few weeks ago uh we're now down here to about $85 a pound which is still absolutely awesome and fantastic uh to put things in perspective uh boss resources uh sorry boss energy and uh Paladin energy uh both were previous uranium producers and they both went offline when the price of uranium was around about $30 a pound uh so being up here at about $85 a pound I think it's quite good and we might see this I expect we'll see this drop a little bit more um and then hopefully it should steady out and then continue to steadily rise as the demand for Uranium increases so why we looking at uh Paladin well uh we reviewed boss and we reviewed Paladin because they're really the closest to near-term producers so as as far as people that already have a deposit have infrastructure and are ready to come on online become operational mines you know ASAP uh those are the two Best Bets as far as I can tell uh so we'll just quickly go over them have a look now there's not that much information on Paladin about the resource and the geology and things like that normally I stick to reviewing the sort of geology of projects and whatnot all right let's get going and most of the information I'm going to go over is just coming off their website um and different information that's been made available by Paladin um and that's what we're going to have to base it off we've got a few little other pieces that we'll go to as well um but let's get cracking now the first thing I will say one of the things I like about Paladin a lot is that they have Assets in uh a variety of different locations okay so if we go down and have a look at where they're located head offices in wa that's great uh and then they've got these two Advanced projects here in Australia so they've got Mount Isa which is great um Australia in minji and um and K bore Advanced exploration now they have uranium deposits in these two locations as well uh Canada they have a uranium deposit as well and they also have their main Flagship I guess which is the Langer hrich mine in Namib um Namibia right so Namibia is a a classic uranium mining Province and area in Africa um it's quite stable as far as the country goes and as far as Sovereign risk compared to a lot of African countries so that's something to keep in mind and all these other provinces where they have deposits as well um you know obviously very stable Canada and Australia so we'll go through and have a look at these uh one at a time we'll start off with the uh the mine so this is a mine that was previously operational um it's been car maintenance for a good 10 years or so now and they're just firing it up and expecting just to recommence production very soon uh they already have stock piles of ore sitting there on the ground so they'll start processing that ore first and then they'll start mining um what they've got left in the pit after that so that all sounds really good to me one thing that um and this is important because I'll come back to this later one thing I've been mindful of when looking where to put my money it's not a lot of money I can tell you but um uh is I look at what's happened with nickel recently with BHP and I look at you know that um BHP with all their ESG and their low carbon nickel and you know all these great things um have a high cost associated with their production right to meet these environmental um requirements and I don't think Meeting those environmental requirements is bad at all I think it's something that we should all strive to do but quite simply there's a lot of nickel producers which have come online from Indonesia and they all produce the same nickel right they just do it a lot cheaper a lot lot cheaper and BHP has decided to shut down all of its nickel operations in Australia because it just can't match the price under the methods that it has decided to produce nickel and I think this is going to be an ongoing concern for me moving forward with any company that I invest in I really want to be thinking to myself well the cost of operating in countries like Australia can be very high like very very high the wages are High um the cost of diesel and transport and just the cost of everything really really high um in addition to that you do have much higher standards of I guess Environmental Compliance although I'm not sure that's quite true you certainly have much higher standards of compliance um I'm not sure you have higher standards of environmental care for example I think it's just the cost of going about to achieve the same thing can be more expensive in places like Australia because you have more controls in place and bureaucracy in place um that you need to manage all right so what I'm saying is effectively I don't think you're going to be really polluting the environment anymore in Namibia than you are in Australia but it's going to cost you a lot more to to to achieve the same environmental outcome in Australia than it might be in Namibia because because the amount of red tape and bureaucracy have to step through that's just I guess based off my experience but I might not be able to back it up right but that's just that's just something I'm conscious of all right so let's just go through the latest company presentation this is the 2024 Global Metals Mining and critical minerals conference 25th to 28th of February um and we're not going to go through and stop everywhere here we're just going to talk about a few little interesting points and um and keep moving on first slide I just want to point out they're discussing I guess the value of uranium for a green future and a zero carbon zero carbon or a um carbon neutral environment and what they highlight here is that when you look at all the different renewable uh sources of energy uh solar and hydro are more CO2 intensive than what nuclear is so nuclear and wind are the most efficient when it comes to CO2 production so cool that's great I think any of them are good you better than Co and gas that's for sure but um it's a nice little thing to point out the importance of nuclear in the uh the future that we are moving into the mines previously been operational for 10 years uh and they produce 43 million pounds of uranium so that's sweet they're on schedule for production in the first quarter of this year so time's running out I guess they talk about their offtake agreements now 50% of their plan production at this point is uncontracted so they're looking for buyers for Uranium I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing to be honest with you um I would expect that if the demand for Uranium is as high as what you know we sort of all think it is and so forth with um Paladin about to start the Comm about to start production of uranium now that you would want you know a lot more of this um secured and guaranteed but you know it's it's all good strength let's keep going all right market cap of 3.4 bill right share price of $11.13 per share now um they are currently undergoing a share consolidation so basically what will happen is I I I I can't tell you the details of the share consolidation at the moment moment that's not what I'm making the video about generally what happens with the share consolidation is they'll say well for every you know we've got 100 million shares on the share market at the moment um but we're sort of we're Overexposed we've grown too much and so got too many shares out there the company's been diluted and what we want to do is we want to uh reduce that 100 million worth of shares down to say 20 million worth of shares and then in essence what's that what that means is that the share price should go from what one1 you know if you got 100 million 100 million shares at $13 a share and you reduce you just compress those right down to 20 million shares well what you know is does your share price go up five times and now the company's worth you know $5 a share where I'd say that you know to be fair if you look at the amount of resource um that boss have has and they have a market cap of about 1.5 billion or 1.15 billion sorry 1.15 billion I believe it is Paladin have a two or three times the size of the resource and as much uranium as they do and they seemingly have uh about three times the market value as well uh so that does seem to be reflected here so by and the the share price though of boss at the moment's you know three and a half cents or something similar to that you know um $310 per share so I dare say that you know after the consolidation um that market cap that value is probably still going to be about the same you know two to three times of what boss have um but the share price should be a lot higher now what that means for me I don't really care it sounds a bit rough but um I guess my decision as to whether or not I'm going to invest in um Paladin it doesn't really um weigh much on whether I buy before or after the share consolidation um if anyone here watching this has any advice on generally how share consolidations play out and whether you think it would be better to buy before the consolidation or after the consolidation please leave a comment um because you know that's not my area of expertise at all but um I just wanted to point that out it'll be it's important for me to to talk about now we have the board we don't talk about the board we don't talk about the executive people either ESG we don't talk about ESG so the other thing we like about Paladin which we've touched on already is just um uh I guess their inventory of uranium that they have at the moment so they're just pointing out they have these other projects we've spoken about that earlier um and they they've put a lot of money into them so the Michin um deposit in Canada for example they put 75 million in um exposion in the ground there that's fantastic 17 million into wa and up at Mount Isa um 55 million so these guys have spent a lot of money um finding and um and proving up these resources and you know that's good I don't have to worry now that okay they still need to develop their pipeline they've got their pipeline pre-developed uh and that's something for me that's really exciting especially when you're looking at a company for a long-term M um you know if you're sort of investing into a company that has a 10-year mind life uh and all they have is the 10year Mind life and they're only just now or you know in the next few years or halfway through the Mind life starting to develop projects well a project for going from Discovery to um you know actually just being a resource uh can take years you know to getting to the point where you're going to get your your ML and um start doing your feasibility studies you know that can take 4 years to just to get there so the fact that they're starting production again now and all of or a lot of that has already been done on all the other projects is excellent to me all right so if we look at what they've got in Namibia um the Langer Hinrich mine they've got total 140 million tons at an average grade of 415 right so it's not that higher grade which but like I said before this is you know this is uh uranium grades aren't that high really whether it's Inu recovery or it's hard rock you can you can still mine quite low grades um 128 million pounds here all right of uranium so that's excellent and then they've also got um vadium as well as a byproduct um I'll talk about that a little bit when we get to the mineralization so all Reserves and um resources I'll just quickly touch on this um minimal resources how much you expect uh in the ground or reserves are are minable quantities if that makes sense um all right or Reserve so uh the difference between a mineral resource is this is how much we using the best modeling software and the closest drill spacing that we have how much we uh can estimate um is in the ground and then a reserve is essentially the same thing but um it's done to a further level of um of guess qaqc and really this is what you can start to put Financial parameters around and then you can take to the bank all right so you mine reserves all right and and you explore for resources you want to convert your resources to your reserves to be mined if that makes sense all right so um often you know when a mining company is talking about resources like the reserve is what they've got there to take to the bank the resources the potential that they've got to convert to a reserve a reserve is is economically feasible and minable and it meets all the costs you know you can have your resource um um be you can have your resource be so deep that it could never really be classified as a reserve because you know you're not going to mind that deep it's too expensive to get there and and it's not going to work as such so your reserve is really that economically feasible portion of your resource which is proven and completely workable um I mean in theory resources are that as well because there always has to be an expectation that your resource is economic um but it's just really that classification of transferring a resource uh which is you know expiration how much I've got in the ground to reserve what's my ore Reserve all right and reserves also include things like stock piles I've already dug it out the ground it's sitting there in a pile it's ready to go that's my o reserve all right Canadian exploration portfolio so here we go so let's just say they've got 140 million uh tons or 128 million pound here in um in Namibia they've got 27 million P did I say 128 million tons um 128 million pound in Namibia and then a further 127 million in Canada and then in Australia across all these different deposits and I like that they've got one called Valhalla that's amazing uh these are a lot of small deposit looks it looks like another 189 million P so that's that's crazy like that's a lot of lot of uranium that they have up their sleeve all right just take a look at some of their historical performance parameters um let's see if this makes sense so let's go down 2013 uh 27 million tons mined 3.44 million tons put through the mill at a grade of 812 PPM so quite high grade compared to the average grade uh 86% recovery and 5.3 million of uh uranium produced okay so 2014 21.6 mined through so they put more Through The Mill at a lower grade 1% higher recovery and got 5.6 million pounds okay 3.4 in 2015 when I look at this the only thing I really see here which I guess um you know you kind of want to know a little bit more about is you see here how the M grade just continued to drop right the average grade of what went through the mill continued to drop and you sort of think to yourself well why did this happen is it because you mined all your best stuff early right and you as you and so what do you have left now um or do you think that depending because prices were low there's no point putting through high grade stock through the mill right when you're not going to get an Associated price with it so this sounds a bit backwards but sometimes you might for example when prices are low you really just want to put through your lower grade ore which is going to sustain all your operating costs and so forth to get you through the low period and then when prices are really high and it's a banger time right you get all your high grade ore out and that's when you put it through because that's when you're going to maximize your profit if you put or your highest grade ore through the mill and sell it when the prices are the lowest well you know I guess you're cutting off your nose despite your face when the the market cycle changes so I don't know what the I don't know what the answer is here but uh I just noticed over these 5 years here the grades just decreasing decreasing decreasing now the next important thing I just wanted to talk about is found on the website market index I find this website to be super helpful has a lot of really great information on it and a lot of great reviews and um yeah I find it really valuable especially when you're researching companies because you know I go through their basically whole website and um this is Paladin's presentations and I don't see them list their um all in sustaining cost so basically how much does it cost them per pound of uranium to produce uh and this is something that's important for me um it's something that we looked at in the boss announcement as well and it's critical because like I said before when I'm looking for a company I'm looking for something with I guess if it's offshore and it's in Africa somewhere where there is always some level of sovereign risk uh not that great though namii is quite secure and quite a good place to do business but it's still there um you really want to see some sort of cost benefit analysis sorry some cost benefit to being over there some sort of tradeoff so if we look here uh the life of mine all-in sustaining cost is $27 per pound compared to BHP at 27 per pound nextg uh I don't know anything about nextg um 7 $750 a pound maybe we should take a look at nextg and boss energy at $25 a pound you know there's not much difference here between boss and um and Paladin when it comes to their all in sustaining costs like at all one's in Australia but one is in situ recovery as well and the other one is in Namibia and it's hard rock recovery so generally Hardrock is more expensive just as a a general rule um and then it might just be that um um we really need to go take a look at nextg I feel like uh taking a quick look and just overview of the geology and the deposit type here so I like this style of deposit to be honest with you as a geologist I think this is pretty cool so the mineralization here is hosted in calcrete all right so calcrete is a calcium carbonate um which precipitates out of groundwaters when uh climate change occurs so if you go from a uh climate where you have a lot of rain and um high groundwaters right um the water table is really really high uh the water is always slightly acidic as well that will leech the rocks and then as the climate changes and it dries up um that water table will start to dry up as well and it's leeched all the rock it's enriched in calcium and um it will precipitate out as Cal creete which you'll see bound up in the in the upper layers right so um if you're in Australia you're probably pretty familiar with calcrete a lot of people on farms call it Limestone um and often calr does sit over limestones as well but um you know it's it's a very similar thing that it's all calcium carbonate right all right so basically what they've got here is they're mining here in this paleo Channel all right and um importantly what I'll say is the surrounding host rocks so the source rocks for this uranium mineralization is about 18 PPM right so not very high right the background rocks is much higher than normal so you know standard background radiation just generic rocks is anywhere from 0 to 2 PPM right if you've got a rock which is say you know a granite or something and it's 18 PPM obviously that's six times background right it's nowhere near anything that you need to worry about with radioactivity or you know contamination or any of that sort of stuff but it's a lot higher background level of radiation of uranium and thorium and everything else well we're talking about uranium and PPM so uranium in those rocks then elsewhere so when you erode that rock and you mobilize all the uranium over millions and millions and a billion years and then transport it all into an environment like a Paleo Channel it can accumulate and it can enrich and then it gets trapped need something to get it trapped in whether it gets trapped in the poorest Sandstone layers down in the Paleo Channel or whether whether or not it PR precipitates out and binds with the cow creete up the top right when that solution um dries up and precipitates out you know they they sort of classic ways so we looked at um honeymoon where it's in the Sandstone layers and here it's in the cow creete sort of up the top and it's in a hard rock formation which means instead of putting down BS and pumping acid Solutions through and pumping it back up you're digging up that calcrete layer and uh processing it extracting the um the uranium so that's super cool um this is the channel here and basically it's really quite shallow so you've got some quartz and gravel and sediments which are just sitting on the top then down not far maybe 10 m or so you've got the actual calcrete layer which is mineralized and that can be anywhere from 1 to 30 m thick and then the grade of mineralization generally occurs here in sort of PODS throughout the different deposit and then after that you've got all the different um uh uh sediments and stuff for the patio Channel now the interesting and other good thing is that um the the mineral here is carnotite so carti you'll see here see this yellow standing and stuff all over the rock the the the yellow cake right um that's good because your calr is Stained It's visible it's green and yellow and you can tell where your mineralization is so firstly ccr's really easy to distinguish in the profile so you always know that you're digging out the calcrete and then you you you can always pretty much always see when your cowr is mineralized as well because it's stained yellow like this right which means you've got your carot type in the calcrete so when you've got big visual Clues and a well- defined unit that you can chase when your mine it becomes really quite quite easy and quite good so I like this style of of mineralization that's really all we can um we can talk about with these guys so what do we want to say is an overview for Paladin firstly they have a huge uranium resource they've got a mine that's about to come back online and start producing um they've upgraded the technology from when it was last operating they've got proven reserves with all stock piled ready to go and they've got a good mind life there just for Paladin at you know 10 or or I think it's what do they say 17 years in addition to that they've got um uranium focus in three different areas Canada and Australia and they've already put I think it's over $200 million worth of expiration into the ground there which is excellent and they've there proved up another you know 200 million plus pounds of uranium so for me it seems like this company has a pathway to start becoming a producer and earn cash now they can then obviously dividends for their shareholders and so forth but then they can invest profits into exploration and developing the other deposits and um hopefully that means just more and more growth and size so I really do like uh Paladin uh for that if I look at boss for example uh boss seem to have you know everything going good for them um but they have they don't have anywhere near as much uranium as what Paladin has all right so just to finish off and I know this doesn't really help anyone because um you know we're trying to find somewhere to make an investment at the moment and uh to be honest with you I really like pet and what they've got offering they've got a mine coming online and they've got three projects and they've got their pipeline already developed um and this is exactly what I'm looking for for a company that's going to be a large Global player in uranium production but for quite some time um and once things ramp up as well well they only keep snowballing and getting bigger right and you start making Acquisitions and other things like that um I'd be pretty happy at the moment the only thing I just wanted to point out as well is that to be fair and um I try to avoid talking about this but you know boss has a market cap of 1.1 billion um Paladin have 3 billion Paladin has you know 400 million pound of uranium up its sleeve uh boss has a lot less so you're trying to decide well do I buy you know into a big company worth a lot more with a lot more more more pounds or do I buy into a smaller um expiration company like boss which looks like it's going to be profitable as well and has secured some um you know they've owned U 30% ownership in an American deposit essentially so which is is gone a long way to Future proof them but um to be honest with you I kind of want to invest in both I feel like that's a pretty good idea um but I really want to go take a look at next gen now this $785 uh Allin sustaining cost production cost for Uranium has got me like super interested so anyways folks that's the review so far um I can't nothing here I can f with palad in at all you know the the mineralization style and how the mineralization occurs um um is excellent we did see those um reduction in grades over 5 years of what was going through the mill and you could initially look at that and think okay they're running out of or they've already processed the best stuff and it's only the worst stuff left or at that time uh uranium prices were so low that um you know they were just putting uh run of the mill stock through and saving their High rate or you don't really know there's no information like that available that I can find at all so um best not to worry about it anyways I mean to put things in perspective the resources are calculated a 250 PPM lower cut off um the same as what boss energy are so that's fine and if the the lower the cut off is 250 PPM and we're still putting 600 PPM or through the mill um no harm no foul right it's all it's all good and it's all fine uh like I said at this point I want to invest in both of them right does is the problem if only I had more money but um I think I'm going to go take a look at nextg and um see if we'll make a little video on those as well and go from there so thanks for watching I hope this has been uh helpful and um like I said if anyone's got any helpful advice on uh tips on generally should you invest before or after consolidation then um please let me know leave it in the comments below that would be awesome and fantastic so thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next video