Hansen/Taylor Ranch Uranium Project
Black Range Minerals Ltd (“Black Range”) controls 100% of the Hansen/Taylor Ranch Uranium Project (“the Project”), which encompasses more than 13,500 acres. The Project is located approximately 150 kilometres southwest of Denver in the Tallahassee Creek District of Colorado, USA.
Tallahassee Creek is an established mining region and hosts AngloGold-Ashanti Cripple Creek gold mine. From 1954 to 1972, 16 small scale open pit and underground uranium mines operated in the region.The Project includes the Hansen, Taylor, Boyer, Noah, High Park and Picnic Tree Deposits. The vast majority of these mineral rights have been secured under lease and option agreements with surface landowners, together with several State and Federal leases.
The Project contains JORC Code-compliant Indicated and Inferred resources of approximately 90.9 million pounds U3O8 at a very robust grade of 600 ppm U3O8, making it one of the largest uranium projects within the USA. The vast majority of these mineral rights have been secured under four lease and option agreements with surface landowners, together with several State and Federal leases.
Summary of JORC Mineral Resources - Hansen/Taylor Ranch Uranium Project
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The Hansen/Taylor Ranch deposits are found within the sedimentary Echo Park formation of Eocene age. The Echo Park alluvium lies un-conformably upon pre-Cambrian rocks (quartz monzonites, granodiorites, gneisses and schists) that were eroded unevenly throughout time and provided the surface upon which the sediments were deposited. Renewed uplift and associated faulting formed grabens and paleovalleys where the sediments were deposited and the uranium mineralization concentrated.
The Echo Park alluvium contains poorly sorted colluvium as sheet-wash facies in addition to fluvial facies that contain carbonaceous material that acted as reducing agents for the concentration of the mineralization.
It is thought that the overlying Wall Mountain tuff was the source for the uranium minerals that were dissolved into the groundwater and transported through the Echo Park formation. The carbonaceous material then acted as a reducing agent allowing the uranium mineralization to be concentrated and deposited in the sedimentary sandstone layer.
The depth to the mineralized zones has been found to be from 150m down to approximately 190m.