WildHorse a smart bet...

WildHorse a smart bet
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, 2 July 2008

PERTH-based international uranium company WildHorse Energy’s strategy is to take existing projects through to development, operating in nuclear markets that are experiencing rapid and long-term growth in uranium demand. By Wally Graham – RESOURCESTOCKS*

WildHorse has built a portfolio of assets that span advanced exploration through to development projects, in locations with favourable permitting regimes. The company has two projects, Sweetwater and Bison Basin, in the United States and these are located in the Great Divide Basin within the Wyoming Continental Divide.

In Europe, the company has four projects in the Mecsek Mountains of southern Hungary: Pécs, Bátászék, Dinnyerberki and Máriakéménd.

In South America, WildHorse has an earlier stage project in Paraguay.

“The western United States projects have been, and remain, the most likely target to be producing assets first,” WildHorse Energy managing director Richard Pearce told RESOURCESTOCKS.

“We continue to progress well at Bison Basin where we have just started a major drilling program of around 15,000 metres to add additional resource to the current JORC resource at the project.”

The drilling program being carried out at the Bison Basin project is a combination of resource definition drilling, and the drilling of monitoring wells for water and hydrology testing, which is associated with in-situ recovery (ISR) permitting.
“Bison is important for us. It is relatively small project on a global scale, but typical of these types of projects in the US,” Pearce continued.

“It is not going to be a 20-30 million pound project, nor does it need to be, as ISR projects in the US are operating everywhere between 100,000 pounds a year output mines through to 1.2 million pounds per year output mines.

“Our target sits pretty well in the middle of that range and that is our focus – to establish an operational ISR mine with meaningful production levels.”

WildHorse’s aim is to get the resource at Bison Basin up to a level where it can maintain a half a million pounds a year operation for 8-10 years, which would provide it with critical mass in the US market.

To that end WildHorse continues to focus on its Sweetwater project that lies adjacent to Rio Tinto’s Sweetwater Mill, the largest uranium mill in the US. WildHorse’s attention to Sweetwater was heightened when it became public information that Rio Tinto was seeking to sell its uranium assets in the US.

“We are keen to see the resolution of the future of that mill. It is such a significant asset in the US uranium and nuclear supply industries. It is important to the future long-term development of the whole of the Great Divide Basin and provides options on how to best develop our existing assets,” Pearce said.

WildHorse is eager to position itself as a producer as it believes this would give it more opportunities as a company that others would look to consolidate assets with in the Wyoming-Colorado corridor.

The company has been actively looking at a range of assets in the corridor, especially those that would give it the ability to produce uranium, potentially by year-end, but certainly within 2009.

“I think that within the broader investment community, having a producing asset is important as it makes you much more of a candidate for getting analyst coverage and raising awareness in the investment community.

“This also leads to greater access to potential funds that can only invest in production assets or companies that have production, exposure and liquidity,” Pearce said.


WildHorse a smart bet - Part 2
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, 2 July 2008

THE European assets of WildHorse are also gaining attention from a number of perspectives, with momentum building in Europe behind its 2020 targets for greenhouse gas emissions reduction.

“We are firmly of the belief that European Union suppliers of uranium have a good future,” Pearce said.

“We continue to work in Hungary and we have the one large project and a couple of smaller projects there.”

On the larger Hungarian project at Pécs, WildHorse has been permitting a significant drilling program that will extend its resource from 30 million pounds up to around 50-60Mlb.

The company recently drilled at two smaller targets, Bátaszék and Dinnyberki (neither has a resource), to see how each stacked up against the historic data.

“The results from Bátaszék confirmed the historical results, which is what we expected. There is extensive uranium mineralisation in the area with a grade range between 0.02 to 0.07 percent,” Pearce said.

“On the back of that we are now moving ahead with a geophysical and drilling program of up to 50 holes on that target, which will allow us to define a JORC resource.

“Interestingly we drilled our other small target called Dinnyberki. We drilled a single hole in there, again just to get some confirmation of historic data and we hit 2.2 percent uranium.”

Although WildHorse’s Hungarian projects are somewhat longer term, there is an active work program in place and the company is on target for what it intends to do there, in terms of expanding resources and undertaking mining studies.

“We have said publicly that to develop an asset of the size of Pécs in Europe we will almost certainly need a partner and we are actively looking at what our options are for partners for a project of that scale,” Pearce said.

Since RESOURCESTOCKS last profiled WildHorse the company has ventured into South America where it is exploring in Paraguay on a 3500-square-kilometre tract of ground in the Parana Basin, which was part of a substantial uranium exploration project that generated extensive drilling and other data from 1978 to 1981.

“We identified Paraguay through our existing team in the US, who had actually worked on a large scale project in Paraguay in the 1980s,” Pearce said.

“When we talk large scale here we are talking about a 200-kilometre trend of uranium mineralisation that was defined in the 1980s. So it is a very significant mineralised system.

“It has significant potential, even though we are not at resource level, but equally it is a genuinely mineralised system that is now fairly well understood.”

The combination of the South American projects and the North American projects are important to WildHorse’s plans to list on the Toronto Stock Exchange later this year as the North American and South American asset base is well understood in the Toronto market.

“There is still a great deal of depth to that market in terms of finance and also analytical and investor coverage plus a greater depth of knowledge and understanding of South America,” Pearce said.

“That’s an important part of what we are doing and what we are working towards and we are well down the track technically for what we need to do for the Toronto listing.”