Earnings Labs

Energy Fuels Inc. (UUUU)

Q3 2022 Earnings Call· Tue, Nov 8, 2022

$19.60

-4.91%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. My name is Colin, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Energy Fuels Q3 2022 Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Mr. Mark Chalmers, you may begin your conference.

Mark Chalmers

Analyst · Eight Capital

Thank you for the introduction, and good afternoon to all of that are joining today and actually, it's morning for me in Adelaide, South Australia. Yes, we're -- thanks for joining the Q3 2022 conference call. We're always excited to talk about our achievements, particularly with our focus on uranium and rare earth. I'm also pleased to say that we have a new format for our presentation today. We think it tells our story in a simpler, more compelling fashion. Even though our news flow during Q3 has been a little quiet, we're still continuing to make outstanding progress executing our business plan. Certainly, the overarching driver of the uranium markets continues to be the conflict with Russia and Ukraine. It is now clear that Russia must be eliminated from the Western nuclear fuel supply market. And that is putting pressure on uranium conversion and enrichment, and we think will flow to natural uranium markets. The U.S. government continues to evaluate options in this regard, but most utilities are voluntarily moving away from Russian supply. As a result, and we've said this previously and reported, Energy Fuels has secured uranium supply contracts and we're looking at additional contracts at support of pricing. For these contracts, we have significant uranium inventories, which will be fed into the contracts in the early years. And we are working on investing in our minds and hiring people to resume large-scale uranium production as soon as next year. On the rare earth front, I'm very pleased to say that we're installing a light separation commercial scale separation facility at the White Mesa Mill, and we believe if we do that the way we think we can do that, we'll be the first company in the U.S. commercially separating at scale. So very excited about that.…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Puneet Singh from Eight Capital.

Puneet Singh

Analyst · Eight Capital

In the release, you talked about hiring a bunch of new employees to perform work needed for recommencing production. Maybe just expand on what type of work they're conducting. And assuming you make a restart decision, what kind of timeline are you looking at? Or is that asset-specific?

Mark Chalmers

Analyst · Eight Capital

Yes. I mean a lot of these assets have been on standby for a number of years, and they require maintenance and work. So when people say we're ready to start, we want to be like push-button ready to start. When you look at uranium production, like the mill right now, we're currently producing and packaging product at the mill, and we have other inventories we can run at the mill right now. So from the mill, we're currently producing now. We can ramp that up now. At the site -- we're working on a number of our sites. And -- but when I say push-button ready, I mean push-button ready. I mean I'm talking about having the facilities, the maintenance done, things cleaned up, pumps rebuilt. We're rebuilding equipment. We have a shop in Cortez that we have mechanics at. We're doing all the things you need to do to restart. And as I said, we have these existing inventories that we can fill into these contracts starting in 2023, and we can kind of initiate the actual physical production, new production whenever we want to. So I mean it's really about getting everything in order and being able to push the accelerator down when we decide to do that.

Puneet Singh

Analyst · Eight Capital

Okay. And then let's say you do that and you get it ready and the uranium price hits the price that you're looking for, again, is it asset-specific? Or how long kind of would it take to get back into production on, say, one of your conventional assets?

Mark Chalmers

Analyst · Eight Capital

Around 12 months or less.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I'll turn it back to Mark for closing remarks.

Mark Chalmers

Analyst · Eight Capital

Well, that was short and sweet. Again, for those who are listening, thank you for your interest in Energy Fuels. We're a unique company. Most people, when I say this, would either invest in a uranium company-only focused company or a rare earths-focused company. And with Energy Fuels, you get this wide spectrum of elements that others are not focusing on. So if you're interested in the energy transition and you're interested in the kind of elements that we're recovering or plan to recover, Energy Fuels is a unique investment. So again, thank you. We look forward to our next updates. We plan and hope to have news flow over the coming months that -- maybe a little higher level news flow in the next couple of months than we had this last quarter, but don't think that it's not because this last quarter like -- that we're not working hard. We are working hard. Our people are working hard. And I want to say we've got great people. We've got great people. We've got great inertia and momentum, and I'm very proud of that. So thank you very much. Have a good day.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call at this time. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.