Standard Uranium begins first drilling at Rocas project in Athabasca Basin

All right. Welcome back inside our proactive newsroom. And joining me now is Sean Hilliker. He's

the vice president of exploration for standard uranium and Sean. Good to see again. How are you?

Likewise, Steve survived PDAX. So we're doing well.

Good. Good to have you back and in one piece, of course. And you've got a number of pieces of news

to talk about today all surrounding the rocus project of the Athabasca basin. So let's remind

everyone a bit about the project itself and and who's connected to it. And really what

you did some work on this project leading into today. That's right, Steve. So the rocus project is

one of our basement hosted uranium prospects. It's a it's about 4,000 hectares just south of the

key lake mine and mill facilities. So just outside the current day edge of the Athabasca basin.

And this one is under an option agreement with a company called collective metals. So collective

metals can earn up to 75% of the project by completing a number of payments share payments

and expiration expenditures over the next three years. So our prospecting program you mentioned

back in 2025 and the fall was kind of the first boots on the ground work on the project

leading into that year one spend for collective metals. And then now we've just kicked off the

first dual program ever on the project just yesterday. Yeah. And so the the the grab samples that

you got came back with really really positive numbers and really gave you some some insight along

some other work of where these drill targets are going to go. Yeah, it was it was you know kind of

a pleasant surprise a bit on the rare earth element side. You know, we were obviously expecting

some uranium. We knew that there was you know around half a percent historically that had been

noted at surface and out crop. So we went back and we're trying to sort of ground truth and

verify those historical results and then covered other other ground along the you know seven or

eight kilometers of strike that we have of this corridor on the project. So really good to see

good uranium results come back. You know, we've got you know over 0.4%. So pretty close to the

historical things. You know, obviously we're looking for stuff that's high grade more than 1%

but to have those types of grades in out crop at surface is always great. So verify those but then

like you said, we we came back with some really high grade rare earth element results. So

for us having those results come in shortly before kicking off our first drill program. I mean,

we already had our geophysics sorted. We had our you know, our drill targets kind of ready. But

getting these results back kind of helped us, you know, plugging those in and layering those in

to help tweak some targets and actually define some new ones was was really great for us. So

with the high grade rare earth elements, it's it's really nice to see and gives us an indication

of what minerals might be there hosting them looking at the geochemistry. So we'll be following up on

some of those results this season for sure. So it's 1500 meters, 1200 to 1500 meters of drilling

your planning on doing. You obviously can't get a whole ton of holes with that. But what sort of

you are just on the high priority ones right now or you're looking at some other ones as well or

is it going to be a bit of a mix and is it on the uranium side or the rare earth metal side or both?

Yeah, that's a great question. So like you said, you know, 12 to 1500 meters, not a whole lot of

room to run, but the thing is we're looking at really shallow drill targets here. So less than,

you know, a couple hundred meters. So we'll be looking at still, you know, six to eight drill holes,

which is pretty good tests across most of these high priority targets. So that being said,

you know, I'd mentioned that we already kind of did our geophysics. We had our kind of priority

targets in mind. Again, keep in mind that there's never been a drill hole on this project ever.

So linking in those surface results with what we already had planned, you know, didn't change

things too much because, you know, we had good results showing up in high priority priority areas

already defined. But that being said, we might be tweaking our priority slightly based on these.

So some new targets came out of this, which is great and really bolstered some of the ones

that we already had. So looking forward to getting the drill spinning, you know, we everybody got

up there yesterday and we're and we're going to be kicking off and spinning here probably tonight

or in the next day or two. Well, it sounds exciting. Look forward to seeing some of the results from

there and then what comes out of it, Sean. Thanks so much. Really good update as always. And again,

we look forward to an x conversation. My pleasure, Steve. Yep. We'll talk soon. There's lots

to happen. All right. Good. So I look forward to it. Sean Hiliker vice president exploration for

standard uranium.