Texas Rare Earth Resources and AREVA agree to uranium offtake

Texas Rare Earth Resources Corp. (TRER), a company that explores and targets heavy rare earths, recently announced that it has joined a subsidiary of AREVA in a uranium offtake agreement.

"This offtake agreement with AREVA demonstrates industry confidence in the potential commercial viability of the development of our Round Top heavy rare earth project and the marketability of our byproducts,” Dan Gorski, the president and CEO of TRER, said. “We intend to continue to monetize our remaining byproducts such as lithium, potassium and beryllium as we move forward in commercializing our entire resource base."

According to the agreement, which will last five years, TRER must supply 1,500,000 pounds of U308, natural uranium concentrates, to AREVA, which is based in France and is the largest nuclear and renewable energy company in the world. The amount will be broken down to 300,000 pounds per year.

The agreement emphasized the byproduct value potential of Round Top heavy rare earth deposits; the agreement will last five years, depending upon the production and development of TRER’s Round Top project.

“This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first binding offtake contract for a valuable byproduct of a heavy rare earth project,” Jack Lifton, board member and rare earth industry consultant for TRER, said. “We were able to attract a uranium industry market leader like AREVA because of the progress on our Round Top project metallurgy due to our application of the K-Tech continuous ion exchange [and] continuous ion chromatography (CIX/CIC) technology. This separation technology has been applied to the recovery of uranium from similar process leach solutions and is commonly used in the uranium extraction industry. This is a major step forward for Texas Rare Earth Resources."