Alligator Energy has wrapped up its field recovery trial (FRT) at the Samphire uranium project in South Australia, demonstrating effective leaching, ion exchange recovery, and elution across two distinct test wellfields.
The completion of the trial validates the technical viability of the proposed in-situ recovery (ISR) operation and provides crucial data to support the project’s ongoing feasibility study.
Testing across Pattern 1, which represents the primary geological conditions of the Blackbush deposit, yielded outstanding outcomes that met or exceeded scoping study assumptions.
The pattern achieved an industry benchmark 70 per cent uranium recovery rate at roughly 70 pore volume exchanges, maintaining an average extraction grade of 115 mg/L U3O8 and peak flow rates of up to five litres per second.
Meanwhile, Pattern 2 targeted lower-grade, low-flow margins of the deposit to test the extremities of the operating envelope. The results confirmed that ISR mining remains technically feasible across all geological units within Blackbush.
Processing performance proved equally robust. Ion exchange resins in the pilot plant captured approximately 100 per cent of recovered uranium, while sulphuric acid consumption across both patterns remained within highly favourable international benchmark ranges.
Additionally, minor gypsum precipitation encountered during Pattern 1 was successfully resolved in Pattern 2 through refined injection chemistry controls.
Alligator Energy CEO Andrea Marsland-Smith said the trial successfully achieved its core objective of de-risking the project’s technical parameters.
“This achievement reflects the considerable expertise, commitment and collaborative effort of our technical and operational teams,” Marsland-Smith said.
“The trial has achieved exactly what it was designed to do, which was to reduce uncertainty around wellfield design, production scheduling and process assumptions, improve our understanding of the conditions expected during production and provide the information required to optimise and complete the engineering design for the feasibility study.”
Alligator Energy will now integrate the trial data into its detailed wellfield planning and process design, targeting completion of the Samphire feasibility study in mid-2027.
