MURPHY WEST URANIUM PROJECT
Location
DevEx has secured additional highly prospective tenure adjacent to its province-scale Murphy West Uranium Project in the Northern Territory after entering into an earn-in agreement with privately owned company GSW Minerals Pty Ltd (“GSW”) (“Earn-in Agreement”).
Under the Earn-in Agreement, DevEx can earn up to 75% of all minerals within GSW’s three granted exploration tenements, which cover a total area of 2,000km2 of highly prospective but under-explored tenure overlying the southern margin of the McArthur Basin (Figure 1).
With the addition of these tenements, the combined Murphy West tenement package currently under earn-in now covers a total area of ~7,000km2.
Figure 1: Murphy West Uranium Project location, proximal to DevEx's Nabarlek Project and nearby uranium deposits.
Exploration
As a consolidated tenement package, the Murphy West Uranium Project overlies strike extensions of key geological stratigraphy which hosts known uranium mineralisation, including several uranium Mineral Resource estimates within Laramide Resources Limited’s (ASX:LAM) Westmoreland uranium project in Queensland. Many of these uranium occurrences lie within the Westmoreland Conglomerate (Figure 1).
The mineralogy, age and geochemistry of these deposits are similar to that described for the uranium deposits in the ARUP, which lies along the north-western margin of the McArthur Basin where DevEx’s Nabarlek Uranium Project is located.
This suggests that similar processes were active in both areas and potential exists within the earn-in area for unconformity-type uranium mineralisation like that seen in the ARUP fitting with DevEx’s uranium growth strategy (Figure 2).
The region represents an endowment of over 700Mlbs of uranium oxide (U3O8) as defined in current Mineral Resource estimates and production history.
Figure 2: Location of the Murphy West Uranium Project along strike from known uranium occurrences in the Northern Territory and Queensland. Murphy West now includes additional ground from the Earn-In and recently pegged 100% DevEx tenure. Geological interpretation simplified from Blaikie and Kunzmann (2019).
Next Steps
Despite the geological similarities with Westmoreland, the Murphy West Uranium Project has undergone minimal exploration for uranium and, for this reason, the Company plans to undertake a regional scale airborne radiometric and magnetic survey in the coming months following completion of the top-end wet season.