Peninsula Energy Limited

Peninsula Energy, George. Good morning and welcome.

Thanks, Lawson. Great to be here. Following on from Matt, same industry, same state. So there’ll be a lot of similarities in what we talk about, and I’ll try to give a slightly different bent in relation to the thematic and obviously more about Peninsula. So, like Matt, we are a US-producing uranium story. Last year we produced our first drum of yellowcake at the facility that’s on the screen. We have a licensed capacity of 3 million pounds with installed capacity of 2 million. That’s our important disclosures and disclaimers.

So some investment highlights. We have currently under JORC compliant resource. We’re an ASX-listed company. We have 59 million pounds, and we just recently updated that and published it this week. Again, we have 2 million pounds of installed capacity with a license to go up to 3 million pounds. For an additional approximately $10 million, we’d install a third dryer, and that would take us to 3 million pounds. We only have 600,000 pounds under contract, so we have a really open opportunity going forward to look at how we sell our product into the market.

Recently, we continued to develop our technical expertise. We just appointed a chief technical officer that’s had 20 years’ experience in Heathgate, which is a US-owned Australian ISR operation, a technical committee and various consultants. We have been operating in various forms since 2015, and we have a number of people that have worked in Kazakhstan and other US operations. One of the initiatives that we’ve introduced in recent times has been owner/operator drilling. That is our biggest cost driver in the Peninsula project and in ISR mines. So we see this as having a significant improvement in our life of mine all-in sustaining costs, as well as efficiencies. We historically drilled 540 feet a day, and on the second week of the rig arriving, we hit 1,400 feet a day productivity.

We have significant exploration upside, which I’ll take you through later, and the spot price is climbing. We’ve got strong long-term pricing and the growing demand’s huge. And one of the big differences about where uranium is today is that the demand’s real. Biggest fleet of reactors are in the United States and the defense needs are growing in the short term.

That’s our share price, shares on issue, market cap. We have got a large institutional register. Tees River out of the UK hold approximately 16%. Solpats Institutional Investor in Australia hold about 10, and then we have Sprott as our third biggest shareholder.

No young-looking people on the board, and most of those photos are at 20 years ago. I don’t like updating mine. But wealth and knowledge, various backgrounds, and a lot of experience in the industry, both uranium and mining in general. Again, I’ll call out a couple of people. Brian Pole, this is the fourth central processing plant he has built and constructed in both Kazakhstan and the United States. Ralph Knode has nearly 50 years of experience in the uranium industry. And as mentioned before, Gary Birch, 20 years with Heathgate Uranium ISR.

So we’re located in the northeast corner of Wyoming, and it’s just a great place to operate. From a approvals process, it was transitioned from federal to state in the latter part of the last decade. Good access to the agency. Wyoming is the lowest populated state in the United States, so you become a bit more relevant in a small state than you would in some bigger states where you have a lot more operators and so forth.

As Matt highlighted, ISR is very environmentally friendly. It’s got a lot of advantages, but you are mining in a blind state if you like. Your operation is underground, and you’re pulling up your uranium through the transportation of water. We’ve been on this new mining unit since December last year, and we’re getting a lot of learnings, so we had a great start to 2026. However, we had some issues in our well fields with gassing. We’ve rectified those issues, bringing on new header houses. And rather than go through this in detail, I just wanted to highlight that as we’re learning, we’re making changes to our standard operating procedures going forward.

Now, with our flow rates, it takes about three weeks to get the feedback when you make a change because of the time it takes to go through a pool volume. So it’s all important about being patient. We’re introducing techniques that might take a little bit longer to acidify, but the reason we’re doing that is we want more success during our production of that well field. So we wanna have higher availability of our wells, lower maintenance costs in the well fields.

We’ve got an extremely low contract book, so we’ve got huge leverage and opportunity going forward. We made some changes to that in 2025, which was significant benefit to Peninsula. So we’re now exposed to, we call it spot. Our production over the next one to two years, we could easily trade that into the spot market. We’ve got great opportunities, as was discussed just before, about the military needs going forward from 2030 onwards. That has to be produced in the United States of America. So we’re one of five current producers of uranium, and we wanna make sure that we’ve got the greatest leverage and opportunity to take part of those contracts that come available at some point in the near future.

In terms of future growth, we have the largest known ISR project in the state of Wyoming. We have 59 million pounds at our Lance project, and we also have 7 million pounds at our Dagger project, which is located about 12 miles north of the Lance project. County roads and state grid power run through that project. So 66 million pounds on the books, which is a significant resource.

Of that resource, we talk about it in three areas: Ross, Kendrick, and Barbara. Ross is currently fundamentally fully developed and in operation. We have our mining permits for Kendrick. So the next six to eight years of production are under permit. So that’s about 20 million pounds that are yet to be developed that have got exploration upside that we have the permitting in place. And then we have Barbara, which has another 30 million pounds. It’s all contiguous. Sits along strike from our current operation and where the central processing plant’s located, and huge exploration upside. We’re located, as you can see there, just north of Moorcroft along the interstate that runs between Gillette and Rapid City.

So as I said earlier, the US has the largest operating fleet in the world. And there’s obviously a lot of growth potential with SMRs, and there’s SMRs looking to be constructed in the state of Wyoming and many other places within the United States. No matter which way you look at the future-looking supply demand, demand is growing, it’s real, and supply is under a huge amount of stress and challenges. There is a number of the quartile one operations that will be under decline and don’t have any exploration upside.

I think this is quite telling. The United States today consumes 56 million pounds for civilian needs, and last year the United States produced 2 million pounds. Collectively, as five producers, we do not have licensed capacity and resource bases to fill that gap. So the United States has a challenge, and it’s super important for them about security of supply to work with the operators within the United States. For the military needs, it has to be produced within the United States. It has to be processed within the United States. If we produce yellowcake and transport it to Blind River in Canada, that will not be allowed to be used within the United States’ defense needs.

So the opportunity is huge. It’s alarming. I think they’re just getting their things organized in the rare earth industry. That’s been under a lot of stress and issues over the last 15 years. They’ve started to make significant investments in MP Materials and Energy Fuels. They’re putting a lot of investment downstream in the uranium supply chain. They have not gone upstream to the miners. And this is where the greatest stress is and that gap is enormous. So the opportunity just within the United States alone is huge.

One thing I’ll add before I go to the summary is we have an exploration target which is calculated under the JORC code of between 104 and 165 million pounds. That’s on top of the 66 million pounds we have under JORC resource. So when we add those together, and you won’t necessarily convert everything from an exploration target to a JORC compliant resource, we have got the potential to climb over 100 million pounds. If we had a resource base of 100 million pounds, why would we be producing 2 to 3 million pounds per annum? So our upside is absolutely enormous in our ability to look to the future and become a substantial player within the United States and globally.

So in summary, we’re moving from commissioning complexity, which just about every project goes through, and we’re working towards repeatable well field performance. And we’re supported by a US production platform; that’s what’s in the photo there. A large resource base of 66 million pounds with the potential to go well into the hundreds, to 100 to 200, and really driving a disciplined approach to growth. So thank you very much.

Thank you, George. I’m glad you touched on the upside here. In light of what you mentioned, in light of the recent exploration update in which you increased your resource base, I believe Lance is now at 59 million pounds. Is that correct?

That’s right.

What is the path to 3 million pounds? Roughly, when can you get there? What needs to be done? And then what’s the potential beyond that 3 million license capacity?

Yeah, look, for us, it’s all about development of more well fields. So our real focus at the moment is to get through the technical complexities and make sure that we can demonstrate our capability to run these efficiently. So it’s all about building additional mining units. As mentioned before, we’ve got the mining license at Kendrick to build that base. Our first target’s to get to 2 million. So fill the mill and then fill the license. So we’re hoping to be at the full mill capacity by the end of this decade.

Now, in terms of financing this potential expansion and beyond 3 million, have there been conversations with Peninsula and the Department of Energy and other US agencies around potentially helping to fund that CapEx?

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve engaged with the Department of Energy and other agencies within Washington DC to look at ways in which there can be collaboration. There’s a lot of challenges. If the US government or an agency is to fund you, then you’ve got an issue with supplying the US government, so for example, for defense needs. So they need to modify some legislation to make sure that they’re not paying back their own loan, if that makes sense. But yeah, we are working with US government agencies on potential funding.

And then, when Matt and I spoke, we talked about cost. Where does your cost base sit, and are you seeing any inflationary concerns outside of labor?

Yeah. So look, firstly, the difference between our operation and all other ISR operations in the United States, we are the only low-pH acid leaching operation. So the lixiviants that Matt talked about are different to what we do. So sulfuric acid’s our second biggest cost driver and we’ve had the impact not just from an inflationary point of view, but a direct impact from the Middle East conflict. The numbers I’m hearing out of Africa are quite horrific. They’re getting into four digits in terms of the price of sulfuric acid. We thought we were under a lot of stress with our price. We’re not paying anywhere near that, but I’m still unhappy with the price. So that’s our second biggest cost driver.

Our number one cost driver is drilling. And obviously, that’s made up by the cost of the rig, labor costs associated with the drilling, and then diesel. The owner/operator model that we’re working with, we’ve brought in an expert in drilling. He’s actually a fourth-generation Nebraskan water well driller, but he’s actually an Australian. He built up a very successful drilling company and sold it. Drilled 20 million kilometers in that organization. He is actually putting the architecture, sourced and got the rig and is implementing that. So our biggest cost driver is drilling. And it’s not just the cost of drilling, but it’s the sequencing. So if we can actually get that efficiency, which I talked about before, to go from 540 feet a day to 1,400 feet a day is enormous. That really brings back a lot of your timelines. We’ve got a lot of delineation drilling to do, and to do that quicker and cheaper is gonna be a great outcome.

Number two is acid, and we’re looking at other sources of acid. Our acid cost at the current price is actually probably a little bit more logistics than it is the actual sulfuric acid, okay? The United States is basically pretty balanced in its own internal supply demand, so it doesn’t have a big facility to export. So naturally, the producers of sulfuric acid use international prices to price us even though what’s happening in the Middle East is not directly impacting them. But we haven’t seen the total cost come to us that they’re seeing everywhere else.

Cost of labor’s real. And an observer as an Aussie, I haven’t been back home for a little while, but cost of living I think is probably a little bit higher in the US at the moment than in Australia. So you can understand why there’s a need to increase labor rates because people are doing it pretty tough in the United States in terms of just general cost of living.

Another question maybe that could help investors think about the opportunity here is just as you ramp up your production, what are the key risks and milestones and how do you think you’re handling some of those risks, and what are the opportunities?

Yeah, look, if you break our business up into two components and you’ve got well fields and you’ve got the central processing plant, once you bring the uranium up to surface, the process is relatively straightforward. You capture the uranium on resin, you elute the resin, you then precipitate it, filter press, dry and drum. Now, there’s intricacies in those, but it’s not overly complicated in taking the fluid from the well field to a drum. The challenge and the biggest challenge is well field performance. So it’s all about making sure that you’ve got the right concoction within your water to get the quickest speed to acidify and then getting your grade recovery curve to be very economic. So we’re putting all our effort into that.

It works. We produce uranium. We’ve recovered uranium, so we know it works. So we’ve got to optimize how we do it. Every ore body is different around the world. Honeymoon add iron because they’re iron deficient and that causes them challenges in their central processing plant. We’ve got excess iron, so we don’t need to add iron. Everyone’s got a different challenge in their ore body. So what we’re seeing this year and in the last few months is we’re overcoming a number of our challenges that we faced earlier ’cause we’ve transitioned from alkaline leach to low pH.

We’re growing confidence and what we’ve got to do is get out of being in the weeds, as that photo shows, getting into the helicopter and having a look at the blue sky opportunity at Peninsula. Because once people get the confidence in Peninsula that we can deliver on what we say we’re gonna deliver… $90 is not an incentive price for uranium. You have a look at TradeTech, you look at the prices are increasing ’cause Attaprom’s price is going up 37%. It will be over 100. It will be 150. It’ll be more than that. Look at gold. We’re not incentivized to produce uranium at the moment, right? But when that price rises, we’re gonna be the ones that will capture the value.

The prior presenter, Matt, he spoke a bit about M&A and consolidation in the Wyoming Basin and elsewhere in the United States. Is that something that Peninsula may or may not participate in, or how do you even think about that?

Well, look, when you’re on the podium you present that you’re the best company in the world. I say that tongue in cheek, Matt. Look, every company in the United States has advantages and disadvantages, if you like. But again, if you get into the helicopter, there is a need for consolidation. When you look at each individual company in the uranium space in the United States, we’re not big enough to be seriously relevant. We’re small. Our negotiations with the utilities is not as big as when you’ve got the mass. So there is an opportunity and sensible M&A hopefully will prevail. From a resource base, we’re in a different position to what Matt is in terms of when he looks at his resource base. We’ve got to get our well fields working, and we’ve got a massive opportunity along strike at our project.

And then just finally, we spoke about the potential to take advantage of this government agency RFI for several million pounds of uranium. Has Peninsula been able to benefit from that?

Has it what, sorry?

Has Peninsula been able to benefit from that?

Well, there’s no benefit at the moment, but Matt highlighted that we’re probably the only two that’s actually put in our application on time. So there’s an opportunity for everyone. The numbers they’re talking about, at the moment, no one has a mine plan to be able to deliver on their own within the United States the NNSA needs. So there’s an opportunity for all of us to participate. It’s gonna be interesting to see how they structure that to work out what they need and what’s good for the producers. At the moment everyone thinks $97 is a great price, or sorry, some outsiders might think that. There’s a lot of RFPs that are coming out from utilities that are just not being responded to because people don’t believe this price at the moment’s a good long-term price.

That’s interesting. George, thank you for being here. Everybody, thank you for listening in