Kleiner Auszug aus dem gestern veröffentlichten Interview vom Casey-Team mit Ron Hochstein (Präsident und COO von Denison):
Let's start off with the macro-view. Where do you see uranium going?
RH: I think the fundamentals are extremely strong for at least the next five to seven years, if not longer, and that we will see prices from 90 to 120 dollars per pound throughout that period. We may see the odd dip, but on average we’re going to be in that range for the next five to seven years.
So where is the overall future for Denison? Is it consolidation, or just developing the projects, or is it both?
RH: I’d say it is a combination of both. And it is building off our assets, and building up through consolidation. The White Mesa mill is a very key strategic asset in the United States, and so we’re going to build around that through either joint-venture or acquisitions of properties to provide mill feed. We seriously want to look at diversification into in situ leaching in the United States because that would reduce our cost base overall and give us more diversity of supply. Then we build more. I think we have one of the best exploration teams built now in the Athabasca Basin that we have built in the last three years from scratch – a lot of them came from Cameco and have looked at things worldwide, so we want to use that expertise to start looking in other spots of the world as well. So it is acombination. It is going to be organic growth, but consolidation primarily in the United States.
Now what’s the annual production? Estimate?
RH: We’ve recently downgraded our annual production rate for uranium. We were estimating 2.9 million pounds of uranium out of the U.S. in 2008 and 4 million pounds vanadium. As a result of some of the delays in permitting and a number of other issues, we’ve recently downgraded it to 1.7–2.1 million pounds, and most realistically, it'll probably be in that 1.8-million-pound production range. But on the other hand, we’ve upgraded our vanadium production – we were originally talking 4, but now we’re talking 5 million pounds.
We originally forecast the mix of the ore we're producing to be about one-third vanadium, but our new figures are coming in about 20 percent higher than that.
Als Übernahmeziele für eine Konsolidierung in den USA werden Ur-Energy (URE), Magnum Uranium (MM) und Blue Rock Resources (BRD) empfohlen.
Grüße