Latest / WTR Small-Cap Spotlight / Myriad Uranium (MYRUF): Copper Mountain, Wyoming: Building a U.S. Uranium Growth Story at the Right Moment
Transcript
- 0:00SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the WTR Small Cap Spotlight Podcast.
- 0:04SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Tim Gerdeman, Vice Chair and Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Water Tower Research.
- 0:10SPEAKER_00: In today's podcast episode, I'm being joined by Thomas Lamb, CEO of Myriad Uranium, OTC Ticker Symbol M Y R U F, and Canadian Securities Exchange Ticker Symbol M.
- 0:22SPEAKER_00: The company holds a 75% interest in the Copper Mountain Uranium Project in Wyoming, with a definitive agreement in place to acquire the remaining 25% interest via an acquisition of Rush Rare Metals Corp.
- 0:36SPEAKER_00: The district saw extensive exploration and development by Union Pacific in the late 70s prior to the uranium market downturn in 1980.
- 0:45SPEAKER_00: The company also holds a 10% free-carried interest in the Red Basin Uranium Project, which was recently sold to subatomic industries.
- 0:54SPEAKER_00: Red Basin has significant historical uranium resources derived from extensive drilling by accidental in the late 70s.
- 1:02SPEAKER_00: It is reported to also have significant vinandium, which has been designated a strategic and critical element by the U.S.
- 1:11SPEAKER_00: government.
- 1:12SPEAKER_00: Also joining is my WTR equity research colleague, Dimitri Silverstein.
- 1:16SPEAKER_00: Good morning, gentlemen, and thank you for joining me today.
- 1:19SPEAKER_01: Hi, it's great to be here, Tim.
- 1:21SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
- 1:21SPEAKER_01: Good morning, Tim.
- 1:23SPEAKER_00: For those in our audience who may not be as familiar with Myriad Uranium, please tell them about your professional background and then segue to discussing the company at a high level.
- 1:33SPEAKER_00: And I would say even at a more granular level, I know that Copper Mountain has been described as potentially one of the largest undeveloped uranium districts in the U.S.
- 1:42SPEAKER_00: For investors just getting familiar with the project.
- 1:45SPEAKER_00: What differentiates that in your opinion at Copper Mountain from other Wyoming uranium stories?
- 1:52SPEAKER_01: Grace, yeah.
- 1:53SPEAKER_01: You asked me about my background.
- 1:55SPEAKER_01: I was an MA lawyer.
- 1:57SPEAKER_01: I'm a Canadian.
- 1:58SPEAKER_01: I was an MA lawyer at one of these big law firms.
- 2:00SPEAKER_01: And I switched to mining as an entrepreneur.
- 2:03SPEAKER_01: I got a bit fortunate.
- 2:05SPEAKER_01: I started a gold company called Gold Group, one word, in 2005.
- 2:09SPEAKER_01: And we had some lucky bounces.
- 2:12SPEAKER_01: We had a nice IPO and we were a gold producer in Mexico.
- 2:17SPEAKER_01: And that led to all sorts of interesting things, including uh I did a master's at London Business School.
- 2:23SPEAKER_01: Um I joined the board of Russia's second largest gold producer, one of the big Russian companies.
- 2:30SPEAKER_01: I lived and worked in Moscow.
- 2:31SPEAKER_01: Um that was very interesting.
- 2:34SPEAKER_01: And then I uh formed a uh what we call a project generator in East Africa with some partners.
- 2:41SPEAKER_01: One of the companies we created uh was called M2 Cobalt.
- 2:44SPEAKER_01: We sold that to an offshoot of Glencore.
- 2:46SPEAKER_01: That was the nickel pole, effectively the nickel cobalt group out of Glencore.
- 2:51SPEAKER_01: And that was called Gervois.
- 2:52SPEAKER_01: And uh we had a wonderful run there.
- 2:54SPEAKER_01: That was a a cobalt company that had a lot of success.
- 2:58SPEAKER_01: Unfortunately, a few years ago, cobalt crashed during COVID.
- 3:01SPEAKER_01: So I've had an interesting run involved in other projects uh that have uh you know also seen lucky bounces.
- 3:09SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I'm a I'm a mining guy.
- 3:11SPEAKER_01: That's my background.
- 3:12SPEAKER_01: I have I have great partners, including here at Myriad Uranium.
- 3:16SPEAKER_01: We tend to do things together and try to make our investors a really nice return on their investment, and that's that's the ultimate goal, of course.
- 3:24SPEAKER_01: Now, regarding Myriad, uh also got some luck here.
- 3:29SPEAKER_01: Um I was I let's just say sitting on the beach a few years ago trying to plot my next move, and a friend of mine was having trouble in West Africa, in Niger, which is next to Nigeria, big uranium jurisdiction, a basin that uh really controlled by the French and French government historically.
- 3:51SPEAKER_01: And he needed some help uh with the government and uh running the running the company.
- 3:57SPEAKER_01: I speak French.
- 3:58SPEAKER_01: I'm an Africa quasi quasi-Africa expert after 12 years working and living in Africa.
- 4:04SPEAKER_01: I helped um and put some of my own money in, raised other money.
- 4:09SPEAKER_01: Uh but unfortunately, six months in, there was a military coup.
- 4:12SPEAKER_01: It's uh Africa can can be pretty interesting and unpredictable.
- 4:16SPEAKER_01: We had to pivot and we pivoted to, we pivoted fast.
- 4:19SPEAKER_01: We pivoted to Wyoming, to this project, Copper Mountain.
- 4:23SPEAKER_01: It's called the Copper Mountain Uranium Project.
- 4:25SPEAKER_01: We immediately found a very good project inside the United States, again in Wyoming, which is the best jurisdiction, probably in the world actually, but certainly the best one in the U.S.
- 4:37SPEAKER_01: And uh here are the characteristics of Copper Mountain.
- 4:40SPEAKER_01: It's it's it was advanced by Southern California Edison, basically supporting Union Pacific Railway.
- 4:49SPEAKER_01: Uh Union Pacific Railway had a had a uranium arm called uh Rocky Mountain Energy.
- 4:56SPEAKER_01: These railroad companies, oil companies, uh historically, they they're involved in uranium uh uh and other investigation of other commodities in the U.S.
- 5:05SPEAKER_01: for very interesting historical reasons.
- 5:07SPEAKER_01: Get into that at some point if you like.
- 5:09SPEAKER_01: Copper Mountain turned out to be an exciting project.
- 5:14SPEAKER_01: In the 1970s, Union Pacific Railway uh invested basically call it$100 million.
- 5:22SPEAKER_01: They drilled 2,000 boreholes, et cetera.
- 5:24SPEAKER_01: Um, they delineated a big resource.
- 5:27SPEAKER_01: And effectively it's a district scale project.
- 5:30SPEAKER_01: Uh lots of mineralized zones, big land package, um, has a big resource base, plus significant upside.
- 5:39SPEAKER_01: And this is not under very well understood by the market currently, so it's a it's a great opportunity.
- 5:44SPEAKER_01: And as you mentioned, we have a 10% retained interest in the Red Basin project in New Mexico.
- 5:50SPEAKER_01: We got a bunch of cash for selling that, uh, very profitable for us.
- 5:55SPEAKER_01: And our partner, strategic partner in New Mexico, is I think the smartest uranium group in the U.S.
- 6:02SPEAKER_01: uh, because it's a combination of uranium people, plus technologists, uh, 8 VC, which is effectively the PayPal uh folks who we all know very well.
- 6:13SPEAKER_01: Um, Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, and then others.
- 6:17SPEAKER_01: Plus Overmatch out of uh Austin, that's an advanced weapons tech VC.
- 6:21SPEAKER_01: We have great partners.
- 6:22SPEAKER_01: So that's Copper Mountain Uranium Project, Red Basin in New Mexico.
- 6:26SPEAKER_01: I think we're a very interesting company.
- 6:28SPEAKER_01: I look forward to telling you more.
- 6:30SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
- 6:30SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you for that, Thomas.
- 6:31SPEAKER_00: I got I have to say, and I don't say this often to our uh guests, you have a most interesting professional background.
- 6:36SPEAKER_00: So uh would definitely like to sit down and talk about that more someday.
- 6:40SPEAKER_00: And uh the company's investment thesis is really intriguing.
- 6:43SPEAKER_00: So I look forward to turning it over to Dimitri to learn more about the company.
- 6:46SPEAKER_02: Yeah, very good.
- 6:47SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Tim.
- 6:48SPEAKER_02: Uh Thomas, uh you recently doubled the Copper Mountain land uh land position uh after the high-resolution airborne uh geophysics, which identified extensive new uh anomaly areas east of the historical resource footprint.
- 7:02SPEAKER_02: How important could you uh could these uh new targets be for, you know, you talked about this being a district level uh resource.
- 7:10SPEAKER_02: So when you talk about district scale thesis, you know, how does it support this?
- 7:16SPEAKER_01: Well Copper Mountain is a basement-hosted fractured granite uh hard rock uranium project, mostly with some sandstone in the south that could be roll front.
- 7:31SPEAKER_01: Um and historically they identified a kind of a core resource of 27 million pounds.
- 7:37SPEAKER_01: That was going to be maybe the foundational resource for the large-scale uranium mine that was gonna start production in 1983.
- 7:44SPEAKER_01: And then the periphery around that, uh, Union Pacific identified lots of targets, lots of prospects.
- 7:50SPEAKER_01: And they they believed they could get the resource up to say 65 million pounds of uranium and plus, this and above.
- 7:58SPEAKER_01: That would be a huge project inside the U.S.
- 8:01SPEAKER_01: In 1982, the U.S.
- 8:03SPEAKER_01: Department of Energy via Bendix, an engineering firm that they they'd engaged, assessed the uranium endowment at Copper Mountain to be could be up to 655 million pounds.
- 8:15SPEAKER_01: That is, you know, could be the biggest in the U.S.
- 8:18SPEAKER_01: That's that's enormous.
- 8:20SPEAKER_01: The geophysics that we shot in December 2025, so December just passed, just blew our hair back because it showed anomalies, radiometric and mag anomalies, the signatures where our known resources are, uh, and all the known prospects that I just talked about.
- 8:41SPEAKER_01: But it identified a north-south structure to the east that we did not previously know about, and it showed the same signatures on the other side of that structure to the east that we nobody's ever explored, nobody's ever talked about, and say uh 95% of known resource and prospects are to the west of that.
- 9:04SPEAKER_01: We now have an area to the east that looks very similar and is huge.
- 9:09SPEAKER_01: Um this so incredibly exciting, it extends the district scale thesis that we have to this other area.
- 9:17SPEAKER_01: Uh and it it could just really you know, it looks from the if you look at our press release, you'll see that people can look at the geophysics themselves.
- 9:26SPEAKER_01: It's just very, very cool.
- 9:28SPEAKER_01: So um take a look.
- 9:30SPEAKER_01: Um multi multi-deposit big district uh story now um could multiply the overall resource uh that we have at Copper Mountain.
- 9:41SPEAKER_02: Understood.
- 9:42SPEAKER_02: So it's a nice segue into my next question.
- 9:44SPEAKER_02: You did put out a press release uh uh just I think yesterday or today, um, talking about your phase two drilling program.
- 9:51SPEAKER_02: So can you walk us through the objectives of this phase two drilling program and what milestones investors should watch for?
- 9:58SPEAKER_02: Uh let's say over the next, I don't know, six to twelve months.
- 10:03SPEAKER_01: So everybody please put us on your ticker and just follow along, even if you're not an investor.
- 10:08SPEAKER_01: This is this is this is the story of how a company goes from, say, you know, 30 to 50 million market cap to half a billion dollar market cap.
- 10:18SPEAKER_01: This is this is exactly how this happens.
- 10:21SPEAKER_01: And what we're doing, this is our phase two drilling.
- 10:24SPEAKER_01: Uh over a year ago, we we did our phase one drilling.
- 10:27SPEAKER_01: That was a huge success.
- 10:29SPEAKER_01: We discovered that we have something called positive disequilibrium.
- 10:34SPEAKER_01: It means there's a lot more uranium in the ground than these gamma probes, effectively Geiger counters.
- 10:41SPEAKER_01: The gamma probes that were used in the 1970s detected.
- 10:46SPEAKER_01: So we have more uranium, it looks like, and much higher grade than anybody thought.
- 10:50SPEAKER_01: Our phase two drill program that we're about to do is now going to expand and infill the known historic resource.
- 10:59SPEAKER_01: That's what I talked about before.
- 11:01SPEAKER_01: That was say 27 million pounds, that now we already believe is even higher grade.
- 11:06SPEAKER_01: Key milestones to watch.
- 11:08SPEAKER_01: Drill results that we've got coming, the assays.
- 11:11SPEAKER_01: So we're not only putting the gamma probe down the hole, we are doing chemical assays.
- 11:16SPEAKER_01: They never did that in the 1970s.
- 11:18SPEAKER_01: That is what has revealed all this previously invisible uranium.
- 11:22SPEAKER_01: Number one, so those drill results I talked about.
- 11:25SPEAKER_01: Number two, we're going to update our resource estimate, bring it current.
- 11:28SPEAKER_01: That's going to be towards the end of the drill program.
- 11:32SPEAKER_01: And let's see if we can convert a fair amount of what would be inferred resource historically, although we do have a fair amount of indicated, up to the indicated category.
- 11:41SPEAKER_01: That's a higher assurance.
- 11:43SPEAKER_01: So investors should track the meters we drill, the intercept grades that we get, and compare that against the historic grades.
- 11:50SPEAKER_01: We'll do that for you in our press releases.
- 11:52SPEAKER_01: But take a look.
- 11:53SPEAKER_01: We're going to hopefully, you know, beat the historic numbers by a significant margin.
- 11:58SPEAKER_01: That's very exciting, creating a lot of value.
- 12:01SPEAKER_01: And then finally, we're going to see whether the new target areas, I just spoke about them.
- 12:05SPEAKER_01: Uh, there's we have the geophysical anomalies, the mag and radiometric anomalies to the east that are all brand new.
- 12:12SPEAKER_01: We're going to test those.
- 12:13SPEAKER_01: Let's see if we get anomalous results.
- 12:15SPEAKER_01: That's going to be all brand new uranium.
- 12:17SPEAKER_01: Nobody that nobody'd ever uh nobody's ever understood before.
- 12:21SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, could be just uh blow this project wide open.
- 12:26SPEAKER_01: So those are re-rating catalysts, all of them.
- 12:28SPEAKER_01: And uh please watch us build a build a big uh successful company here.
- 12:33SPEAKER_02: It's very exciting to hear.
- 12:35SPEAKER_02: Uh thank you for that, Thomas.
- 12:37SPEAKER_02: Um moving on, when you talk about myriad, uh, you know, you're in the process of of consolidating 100% ownership of Copper Mountain, uh, as uh Tim uh uh referred to in in his introduction uh through the this uh red uh uh sorry sorry uh rush rare uh rare metals merger that you've announced.
- 12:56SPEAKER_02: Um strategically, how you know is is it really important to have a full ownership of this uh resource at this stage of the project, or is this more of an opportunistic type of a transaction?
- 13:08SPEAKER_01: You know, we always had in mind to acquire this last 25%.
- 13:12SPEAKER_01: Copper Mountain is a huge project.
- 13:14SPEAKER_01: It's district scale, it's gonna be one of the important projects inside the United States.
- 13:19SPEAKER_01: And so it's important we own 100% of it.
- 13:21SPEAKER_01: We've been around to the banks in uh New York, London, uh Toronto.
- 13:26SPEAKER_01: We have institutional investors.
- 13:27SPEAKER_01: Everybody wants us to own 100%.
- 13:29SPEAKER_01: It's much easier to do debt financing, also, if you have 100% ownership, so that's for the future.
- 13:35SPEAKER_01: So it truly is a one plus one equals three kind of equation when you acquire 100%.
- 13:41SPEAKER_01: So it eliminates complexity.
- 13:43SPEAKER_01: There's one decision maker, one capital structure.
- 13:46SPEAKER_01: We we do not have to consult a partner when we make decisions, and we don't have to ask them for money either to contribute to the, you know, as we go.
- 13:54SPEAKER_01: And that can always, of course, money money issues always create friction.
- 13:58SPEAKER_01: Um, so we have full ownership uh optionality.
- 14:01SPEAKER_01: We can do whatever we want.
- 14:03SPEAKER_01: Uh also it sends a signal of conviction.
- 14:05SPEAKER_01: This is how we think about it, it sends a signal of conviction to the market.
- 14:09SPEAKER_01: We we love this project, we think it's gonna be one of the big important projects in the United States, Copper Mountain.
- 14:15SPEAKER_01: Um, and we're gonna be able to move fast on permitting, resource development, etc.
- 14:20SPEAKER_01: That's that's why.
- 14:22SPEAKER_02: So with with that, you know, with that as a background, kind of maybe stepping on the other side of this, you recently monetized the Red Basin uh project for about uh 2.5 million, uh, and you retained 10% free carrier and interest, uh formed the strategic alliance that you talked about with Subatomic, uh, which is backed, as you said, by major U.S.
- 14:40SPEAKER_02: uh technology investors.
- 14:41SPEAKER_02: What does that transaction say about the growing um institutional or sophisticated money uh technology sector interest in uranium?
- 14:50SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is uh not not very typical for technology investors to get into uh digging stuff out of the ground.
- 14:57SPEAKER_01: We're very we're very proud to be leading the way here.
- 15:00SPEAKER_01: Uh surprising, we're a smaller company, not one of the big uh, you know, they're only the uranium sector is is very stodgy, very kind of old, uh old technology.
- 15:12SPEAKER_01: Uh there's not much fresh blood, not many new ideas, fresh ideas in the past 50 years, really.
- 15:19SPEAKER_01: Um this goes for everything up and down what we call the fuel cycle.
- 15:22SPEAKER_01: This is converting uranium in the ground all the way up to fuel for large-scale reactors.
- 15:28SPEAKER_01: So that journey is called the fuel cycle, and you you have to uh take the get the uranium out of the ground, convert it to something called hex, uranium hexafluoride, spin it in centrifuges, and then make uh reactor fuel out of it.
- 15:41SPEAKER_01: All of that we were using the same technology.
- 15:44SPEAKER_01: It's backed by the same money.
- 15:46SPEAKER_01: Uh the utilities have buyers that uh, you know, big utilities that run nuclear power plants, same buyers, and it, you know, everybody.
- 15:54SPEAKER_01: Bottom line is we need a shakeup.
- 15:56SPEAKER_01: Um and technology firms in the U.S.
- 15:59SPEAKER_01: have a huge amount of money, and the VCs and of course the ultimate owners, we're talking about the big names in technology, everybody knows.
- 16:06SPEAKER_01: It is time for them to get into this sector.
- 16:09SPEAKER_01: They're gonna be able to secure the uranium they need for their uh AI data centers, you know, effectively hyperscalers.
- 16:17SPEAKER_01: And this is it.
- 16:19SPEAKER_01: So this is gonna, you know, this is the opportunity, I think, for investors to get in, not just with Myriad, but maybe a couple of the other exciting names in the uranium space inside the U.S., it means that AI data, this is Microsoft, this is Peter Thiel, this is um, you know, Elon Musk, whoever, uh, Google, et cetera, they're gonna come into this space and they're gonna go after the uranium in the ground.
- 16:43SPEAKER_01: So while our number, say 2.5 million cash, by the way, we think we paid$375,000 for this property and we sold, just sold it 14 months later for 2.5 million cash plus a 10% free carriage interest, which we think is very, very valuable.
- 16:58SPEAKER_01: It may seem like a small number, but in our space, that's actually a very significant amount.
- 17:03SPEAKER_01: And um, we can create huge leverage with that cash.
- 17:06SPEAKER_01: That's the exciting thing about uranium, as investors will see.
- 17:10SPEAKER_01: So uh, you know, the tech people are coming in.
- 17:14SPEAKER_01: It's an indicator of this exciting time in this space inside the US.
- 17:18SPEAKER_02: Certainly does seem that the growing growing interest in uranium among investors and and obviously the capital markets is you know, all this opportunity or the need for for energy and for electricity with AI centers and and uh these uh store, you know, server farms coming in.
- 17:35SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, energy security is really becoming a major theme here.
- 17:38SPEAKER_02: And I think uh that's one of the reasons why uranium has come into the spotlight again for investors for the first time in what looks like 50 years almost, it seems like.
- 17:46unknown: Yeah.
- 17:47SPEAKER_02: Okay, so before I let you go, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you.
- 17:50SPEAKER_02: Uh with a solid balance sheet that that the company has currently, you know, the fully funded drill campaign.
- 17:56SPEAKER_02: Uh you have plans for U.S.
- 17:57SPEAKER_02: listing, uh still deciding between New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, from what I understand.
- 18:02SPEAKER_02: Uh and there are several near-term catals that you've outlined for us.
- 18:05SPEAKER_02: Where do you believe the Myriad stock or Myriad as a company could look like or be materially different a year from now versus where it is today?
- 18:16SPEAKER_01: We're going to be publishing uh ongoing drill results.
- 18:19SPEAKER_01: This will be um uh gamma probe results and assays as we drill.
- 18:25SPEAKER_01: And if we hit what we hope, uh if we hit uranium at our new geophysical targets, if we as we as we did in our last phase one program there, if we drill the existing, like the known resources and we hit uranium there as we anticipate, it would be strange if we don't, and we we get positive disequilibrium in those places, i.e., the grades are higher than the historical numbers, which we think there's a very good chance they will be.
- 18:55SPEAKER_01: We could be a transformed company here.
- 18:57SPEAKER_01: This is this really is what I and what I spoke about at the beginning.
- 19:01SPEAKER_01: This is where you go from 50 million market cap to 500 million market cap.
- 19:06SPEAKER_01: And so we have all these catalysts.
- 19:09SPEAKER_01: Um please keep a keep an eye on us.
- 19:12SPEAKER_01: We could be a much bigger company, and I think there's gonna be consolidation and a lot of MA in this sector.
- 19:18SPEAKER_01: I think we're definitely a target, and uh, you know, they'll keep there are very likely to be transactions uh in our future and everybody else's in the sector.
- 19:28SPEAKER_02: Understood.
- 19:28SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Thomas.
- 19:29SPEAKER_02: Sounds like a very exciting 12 months uh in front of the company.
- 19:32SPEAKER_02: With that, I'll turn it over back to Tim.
- 19:34SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Dimitri.
- 19:35SPEAKER_00: And uh Thomas, thanks for joining us today.
- 19:37SPEAKER_00: Again, a very interesting story.
- 19:38SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to watch how it unfolds.
- 19:40SPEAKER_00: And I know that certainly capital markets seems to really be refining their focus on uranium just based on the sheer volume of things I read and see on CNBC and Bloomberg.
- 19:49SPEAKER_00: So very timely.
- 19:50SPEAKER_01: That's right.
- 19:51SPEAKER_01: Very good.
- 19:52SPEAKER_01: It's been a pleasure, gentlemen.
- 19:53SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
- 19:54SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, as well as visiting WW Watertower Research.com to stay up to speed on the company's small cap written research reports, podcasts, fireside chats, industry specific symposiums, and conference schedules.
- 20:10SPEAKER_00: We will see you next time for another edition of the WTR Small Cap Spotlight Podcast.
- 20:16SPEAKER_00: Finally, a special thanks to the producer and editor of the podcast, Krista Fitzpatrick.