Marenica Energy, an Australian uranium explorer, released a company update on Thursday, following significant corporate developments over the Christmas period and the receipt of encouraging new exploration data from its 80%-owned Marenica Uranium Project in Namibia, Southern Africa. [1] With the entry of Areva, the French nuclear giant, into its capital structure,  the Company enters a new chapter in its development.

Marenica was formerly known as West Australian Metals. As this company had a change of management in the spring of 2009, earlier developments are of limited relevance for Marenica today. However, in the spring of 2009, Marenica was nearly broke. This was prevented by Batavia Mining who bought 30 million shares for $0.07 AUD each, giving Marenica $2.1 million AUD of cash. In June 2009, MEY raised another $9.9 million AUD through a placement which was taken up by POLO Resources (49.56 million shares at $0.12 AUD), Amber Petroleum, now AFNat Resources (20.65 million shares) and associates who acquired the remaining 12.39 million shares.

After this capital raising, Marenica Energy announced a drilling program for their Namibian Marenica project which they conducted in the summer and fall of 2009. This led to a resource upgrade for the paleochannels (secondary uranium) after they evaluated 39% of the drilling. They now have 38.6 Mlbs uranium at an average grade of ~ 150-160 ppm (up from 34 Mlbs at 140 ppm). The grade is not quite clear as they make a difference between indicated resources (170 ppm) and inferred resources (140 ppm) The final resource upgrade is expected in January 2010 and are expected lift the overall resource somewhere in the ~45-50 Mlbs category. More would be a pleasant surprise.

It is also expected that Marenica will be able to increase the average grades to ~ 180 ppm. In particular, the last drilling results with average grades of 196 ppm could prove to have a positive impact on the final upgrade. It should be noted that 94% of the total resource discovered up to date, are not deeper than 40 m below the surface with 80% being not deeper than 20m, which will reflect in the scoping study, due to be released in March/April.

MEY also had some drilling done at the Phillipus Dome, which were disappointing and some more at Springbok which are still pending but which are expected to…

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