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Sydney, Mar 13, 2007 (ABN Newswire) - Dr John Santich: Marathon Resources has been around for a couple of years now, and our focus has obviously become uranium, and uranium at Mt Gee. The potential is for it to become one of the next uranium mines, or the next uranium mine in South Australia, or Australia.
No uranium mine has been developed in Australia for the last 20 years, really. So we are looking forward to developing production at Mount Gee which will be available for export of at least 1,000 tonnes of uranium a year.
The major benefit that we see coming out of the present drilling program is confirmation of everything that we’ve said. The thicknesses and the grades are proving to be at least as good as we’d anticipated from Marathon’s model and in many cases better, so we’re very pleased with those results.
Dr Wieslaw (Vic) Bogacz: According to our model and exploration and the work we’ve done, taking into account historical data and our own reading and exploration and model, we came up with the figure of 59 million tonnes of ore mineralisation with 0.068 per cent uranium oxide, which gives us about 37,000 tonnes of uranium oxide. Which is a pretty good deposit - one of the largest in Australia and also internationally.
Dr John Santich: Marathon’s deposit is ideally placed in terms of both its ore and its development potential. It’s in a province where there’s infrastructure nearby, we’ve got a good team, we’ve got the right sort of ore, we’ve got the right sort of tonnage and we have essentially the approval of the state government – it’s supported it in every possible way.
We’re well aware that there haven’t been uranium mines developed in South Australia for a couple of decades. And we don’t see any particular stumbling blocks to its development.
Obviously we’ll be going through the normal processes, and there’s going to be a lot of attention on Mount Gee. We’re going to be looking at the political, social, environmental considerations, but we’ll just have to pay a lot of attention to them.
Besides Mount Gee, we’ve got other uranium possibilities. Of course we have a joint venture with UraniumSA looking at the Kingoonya palaeochannel uranium. But in addition to that we have tenements in the Gawler Craton and northern and central Gawler Cratons which are prospective for iron oxide copper-gold deposits, which include uranium; we have base metal and copper-gold deposits in the Flinders Ranges and we have a small gold project in western Victoria which we’re hopeful may turn out to be a small gold mine.
I think the involvement of CITIC, and particularly the managing director of CITIC [Australia], Chen Zeng, on the board of Marathon is a huge endorsement for the company. The important player in the future is going to be China without doubt as well as India, and I think for the Asian community to see the support that CITIC’s given us will be very much a positive for Marathon, quite apart of course from having the support of Chen on the board himself. Somebody with his level of experience and knowledge of the Asian market and the Australian mining market.
We’ve also got Denis Wood on the board from the Talbot Group. And the Talbot Group have demonstrated their knowledge and experience to take an essentially brownfields project – Coppabella [Coal Project in Queensland] in their case – through to mining and into a major mining group. There’s no reason why that experience can’t add value at Marathon and enable us to do precisely the same thing in the uranium field.
In addition to that, they’ve had a lot of experience in independent marketing and I think that that’s the way the uranium industry is going to go as well. So we’re very well placed there and it makes the board very strong.
Marathon not only is an exploration company but it has a resource. It has a huge resource and it has a resource that’s capable of development. It’s in the right state, it’s in the right part of the state, it’s got the right sort of metallurgy, it’s got the right tonnage and it’s got the right grade. Marathon’s the obvious company to invest in when you have a look at that range of companies that are available.
