Rossing Uranium has been given a new lease on life and will continue operations until 2036.

Managing Director Johan Coetzee announced the extension of the mine's life at Swakopmund.

The formal life span of the Rossing Uranium Mine was set to end in 2025, and the previous majority shareholder, Rio Tinto, considered closing operations in 2020.

Following the sale of Rio Tinto's 67% shareholding to China National Uranium Corporation, Rossing Uranium has assured a positive cash flow and continued operations until 2025.

In 2021, Rossing Uranium embarked on a feasibility study to explore the possibility of extending the mine's life span to 2036.

"We are currently mining phases 2 and 3, and now phase 4 is just another pushback on the existing open pit, and that was basically necessitated by the fact that the life of the mine was 2026 because at the bottom of the pit, in phases 2 and 3, it just got too narrow to mine there anymore, so we had to open up a new one. Obviously, this comes at a cost, and the first 200 meters of phase 4 will be a waste of time. So soon enough, we will start 2023 with that pushback to allow us to use the revenue from phases 2 and 3 to fund the stripping, and then at the end of 2026, when we finish at the bottom of phases 2 and 3, we will be on the ore. In phase 4, we can just continue for another 10 years at about the same production rate," said Coetzee.

He further explained how the new operational model will work.

"In terms of the operation model, we will run until the end of 2026 with a mixture of contract and owner mining, and then from 2027 on, we will be fully contractor mining, and the reason for that is just that to purchase a new fleet, it's about N$1.4 billion, so that makes the economies we have to put into that, the financials, it just doesn't make sense in terms of not destroying value in the operation."

The MD says the extension will ensure that there are technological upgrades on the plant, as detailed in the N$100 million feasibility study.