The Energy Question Episode 32 – Amir Adnani, CEO of Uranium Energy Corp.

In Episode 32 of The Energy Question, David Blackmon interviews Amir Adnani, the CEO of Uranium Energy Corp. UEC is the largest, diversified, United States-focused uranium company.

UEC is a pure-play uranium company and is advancing the next generation of low-cost, environmentally friendly In-Situ Recovery (ISR) mining uranium projects.

The Company has two production-ready ISR hub and spoke platforms in South Texas and Wyoming, anchored by fully licensed and operational processing capacity at the Hobson and Irigaray plants. UEC also has seven U.S. ISR uranium projects with all of their major permits in place. In this episode, David and Mr. Adnani talk about UEC’s business endeavors, the opportunity for uranium production in Texas and other areas of the United States, and why a renaissance of nuclear energy will be necessary of the world is to meet its net-zero goals.

Run of Show:

The Energy Question Episode 32 – Amir Adnani, CEO of Uranium Energy Corp.

David Blackmon [00:00:10] Hello, welcome to the energy question with David Blackmon. I’m your host, David Blackman. My very special guest today is Amir Adnani, the founder and CEO of Uranium Energy, which is America’s leading fastest growing uranium mining company in the United States. And I. Amir, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Amir Adnani [00:00:31] Pleasure’s all mine. Thanks for having me.

David Blackmon [00:00:33] You bet. I’m an old oil and gas guy, but I’m also been a long-time fan of nuclear energy. And I realized that I understand the need for more of it in the United States as a zero-carbon energy source.

David Blackmon [00:00:48] And so I’m really glad to talk to you because we haven’t focused enough on the need and the future for this key energy source here on my podcast. But before we get into the Q&A, I want to give you a couple of minutes to talk about the history of your company, you know, where it started, where it’s going in, and how you plan to get there.

Amir Adnani [00:01:08] I’m an entrepreneur by background and have been involved and focused on energy-related and commodity-related businesses for the last 20 years. In the 2004, and 2005 timeframe, I looked at what was happening in nuclear energy and we were certainly experiencing the early innings of a nuclear renaissance. I looked at what was happening in the US and in the US. Back then we were importing 90% of our uranium requirements and I thought this doesn’t make sense.

Amir Adnani [00:01:37] And I really started to take a deeper look at the history of uranium mining in the US and was fascinated by the fact that not only was the civilian nuclear energy program to generate electricity, it started in the US,.

Amir Adnani [00:01:50] But we had the largest fleet of nuclear reactors anywhere in the world and the history of uranium mining was written by US oil and gas companies in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Companies like Exxon, Chevron, Texaco, and ConocoPhillips were the pioneers of uranium mining and particularly a very unique extraction of uranium called In-Situ recovery, which is much more familiar, similar to oil and gas recovery than actual mining. And these all disappeared.

Amir Adnani [00:02:19] Why did these companies disappear? Why did the uranium mining industry disappear in the United States? Because when the Cold War ended, the US decided to sign a treaty with the Russian government to dismantle Soviet-era warheads that the Russians had too many of.

Amir Adnani [00:02:35] To take highly enriched uranium out of doors warheads blended down to low enriched uranium and sell it into the market. This became the equivalent of the world’s largest uranium mine and destroyed the domestic industry in the US. The positive end of it is that it did, over the course of 20 years, helped dismantle and wait for this 23,000 Soviet-era nuclear warheads.

Amir Adnani [00:02:58] And so it did a lot in terms of security and the stockpiling the Soviet missiles, but it destroyed our industry. So fast forward to really the company’s background in Genesis. I became quite fascinated by the productive history of uranium in South Texas.

Amir Adnani [00:03:17] South Texas, according to the US Geological Survey, contains the largest potential deposits for uranium in the United States that are untapped and unexplored. Much of this potential happens alongside oil and gas basins like the Eagle Ford Shale and the Barnett Shale.

Amir Adnani [00:03:33] These areas that have been very productive for oil and gas over geologic time have also helped uranium deposits get formed in the same regions. We set up shop originally in Austin, Texas, as a company Uranium Energy Corp, before moving our offices to Corpus Christi to be closer to our South Texas business that we were building brick by brick. We expanded from 25-odd business plan.

Amir Adnani [00:03:56] We got into production in 2010 at our Hopson facility down in Karnes County. That’s the four behind me right? There is a lot of supply, and that’s the largest uranium recovery plant in Texas and one of the largest in the country today.

Amir Adnani [00:04:10] And so our view was that longer-term nuclear power played an integral role in providing electricity in the US. One in every five home in America is powered by nuclear energy. Over 50% of carbon-free electricity generation in the country is nuclear.

Amir Adnani [00:04:26] And so this made no sense that there wouldn’t ultimately be a bigger domestic industry. So we focused we got into production in 2010, hired many people. We were one of the only new uranium mines in the world in 2010 in South Texas. Then we had the nuclear problems in Japan that happened in 2011 with their Fukushima Daiichi reactors.

Amir Adnani [00:04:45] So we entered their market for nuclear energy and uranium that basically lasted about a decade. Unfortunately, during this bear market, we continue to rely as an industry in the US on Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan for our uranium needs. And so during this period, domestic uranium mining basically vanished.

Amir Adnani [00:05:04] And so when I started in 05. When we were importing 90% of our required. Today we import 100% of our requirements. My company was able to survive the bear market and we took on a very counter-cyclical strategy and we thought, you know what, let’s take advantage of the bear market to make acquisitions.

Amir Adnani [00:05:21] Sort of the old saying, you know, you want to buy your Christmas decorations in January. So we got really worried. We were able to roll up assets and not only in Texas where we expanded into Wyoming, we expanded into Canada, we were able to really, again, go bargain hunting.

Amir Adnani [00:05:36] And then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine occurred, which, as terrible as it is, and as much as it’s a humanitarian crisis, it has really brought attention to energy supply chains. And now I think there’s a realization that, holy crap, we can depend on Russia. Okay. Well, I mean, a lot of people kind of knew that before Russia had to get that way. But now finally, the realization is there. Governments, utilities, and everyone are trying as fast as possible to move away from Russian supplies. So we’re a US-based company. We’re a Texas-based company.

Amir Adnani [00:06:11] Today we have operations not just in Texas, but, as I mentioned, Texas, Wyoming and Canada’s Saskatchewan Province, which is home to some of the highest grade uranium deposits. We believe North American supplies and US supplies can provide energy security moving forward and energy security in a world that wants to decarbonize as fast as it’s trying to electrify but needs to do all of that while actually having access to the energy supply chain.

David Blackmon [00:06:38] Yeah, it’s so interesting to hear you go through this history of development of the industry in South Texas. I grew up down there in Bellville, Texas, just 30 miles from we have a facility.

Amir Adnani [00:06:50] We have a project in the county nearby. Yes. Yeah, we’re very active there. Yeah.

David Blackmon [00:06:55] Yeah. I had some cousins in Live Oak County who got very rich in the 1970s on uranium. It was either Dow or DuPont had a big plant just outside of Georgia, West Texas.

Amir Adnani [00:07:06] You’re right. So we have a few of our team members worked at that operation. And the US Steel. US Steel had that project in Louisville County as well. And it was a really successful project, the one you’re referring to. But absolutely.

David Blackmon [00:07:19] Yeah, Minerals and gold, the Ed County. And unfortunately, we never got a lease there, but maybe sometime in the future.

Amir Adnani [00:07:25] We’re in Gold County as well.

David Blackmon [00:07:28] Are you really? Oh, my gosh. I need to call your business development guy. Anyway, sorry I’m not trying to sell a lease here, so I. You know what? What is so perplexing to me in this whole energy transition debate is watching is the same people, the same groups, climate change lobby groups, do you know, advocate for wind and solar and zero-carbon energy, Turn right around in their next breath.

David Blackmon [00:07:54] Breath and slammed the nuclear energy. How do we ever get past that? Because it’s becoming I think everyone is realizing as time goes on that the limits of the real utility of wind and solar is going to be fairly limited and we’re going to have a renaissance in the nuclear industry. So how do we ever get past that? You know, that opposition that seems more emotionally based and fact-based to me.

Amir Adnani [00:08:22] I would say out of necessity, unfortunately. I mean, for good, the right answer would have been science and facts and information, because the science of nuclear energy is one that shows it is the safest form of an electricity generation. It has zero carbon emissions, it has baseload power. So that’s 24 seven 365, and it has over a 95% capacity factor for those data points. For for the science of it all, you would want to enjoy nuclear energy.

Amir Adnani [00:08:52] But let’s take a look at Japan and what’s driving interest in nuclear energy there. And that’s a really important country to look at because in Japan there was a problem with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors in 2011. It did create, excuse me about that. It did create fear. And that concern made the country shut down all of its nuclear reactors.

Amir Adnani [00:09:14] In the last few months, we’ve seen some very profound developments due to energy bills. Every person’s monthly energy bills going up 3 to 4 times, in some cases ten times. In some cases, people are paying more for their monthly energy bills and their mortgage or rent.

Amir Adnani [00:09:31] There is now the largest public support seen in public opinion polls in Japan for nuclear energy since the Fukushima incident in 2011. And the government, as a result, has pivoted and stated it wants to go back to nuclear energy and to restart their idled nuclear reactors, extend their lives and even build more.

Amir Adnani [00:09:51] We’ve had the benefit of hydrocarbons in the United States and the shale revolution and all those developments over the last ten or 15 years that gave us so much more energy capacity in the US that we weren’t hit as hard as Western European countries as Japan was as a result of Russia or, you know, the average person hasn’t yet felt that in their energy bill. We felt it at the pump and we’ve seen that sort of go up and down.

Amir Adnani [00:10:17] But I think when we start to feel it in our pocketbook is when we start to say, how do we get the cost of living down? How do we make sure that energy cost doesn’t become the single biggest cost item to live? This is again, where nuclear really shines. This is where we are in fact, seeing today, for what it’s worth. And I think it’s worth a lot.

Amir Adnani [00:10:35] The highest public opinion polls in favor of nuclear energy also in the United States. And that is why you’re seeing bipartisan support for nuclear energy in Washington, where there’s not bipartisan support for anything, as we both know. I mean, there’s nothing that they agree on. And of all things, nuclear energy is enjoying bipartisan support. Do we have 100% of folks on board with nuclear energy? Of course not. But as we as the facts and information and costs become better understood.

Amir Adnani [00:11:03] The biggest fact about renewables is that the capacity factor is 25 to 30%. Yeah, well you can’t you can rely on something that works only 25 to 30% of the time. People want to be able to charge their electric devices at any given point they run out of battery or run out of juice. You want to be able to charge an electric vehicle if you drive one.

Amir Adnani [00:11:23] These things require electricity around the clock. So it’s just so common sense of it is there now. Let’s go a step further. There’s some really cool stuff going on with nuclear energy. Really amazing because you. Nassau has announced a number of missions and at various sort of launches, whether it’s to the International Space Station, whether it’s to Mars, what Space X wants to do, what Elon Musks.

Amir Adnani [00:11:49] Space travel going forward and for the last number of decades has been powered by nuclear energy. People don’t realize that. But some of the coolest things you can do out there and all these microreactors that are able to provide the fuel needed to travel space.

Amir Adnani [00:12:03] You look at the nuclear navy, the 108 submarines and aircraft carriers are all run on microreactors that provide electricity. Bill Gates and a number of other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are now getting behind small modular and advanced reactors, smaller reactors that you can build in areas where you don’t have a big population.

Amir Adnani [00:12:24] You don’t have a large city, which is historically where reactors have been built. So there’s now a proposed reactor to be built in Wyoming, where there used to be a coal-fired power plant. So the jobs are retained, the infrastructure is there.

Amir Adnani [00:12:36] These coal-fired plants are already connected to the grid. And in most cases there’s infrastructure that you can tap into. There was a very fascinating study by the Department of Energy talking about retrofitting coal-fired power plant sites into small modular or nuclear reactor sites, depending on what the site size requirements were.

Amir Adnani [00:12:55] So these are really cutting edge areas of technological development on energy that nuclear is involved with. And it helps us every day we build another nuclear reactor. Help makes us that much more energy independence and it adds towards national security because you control your own destiny with nuclear energy.

Amir Adnani [00:13:14] And the biggest part of it is how little fuel is needed in a nuclear power plant compared to oil. Did you know, for example, that three barrels of uranium can produce the same amount of energy as 300,000 barrels of oil? So when you start to think about how powerful it can be, the power density of uranium.

David Blackmon [00:13:32] Yeah, the energy density is.

Amir Adnani [00:13:35] That is phenomenal. And that again, is, I think, the common sense of why, you know, anyone would be supportive of it.

David Blackmon [00:13:42] So, you know, so much of the opposition, unfortunately, and I think really irrationally continues to be based on Fukushima, on Chernobyl, on even Three Mile Island 43 years ago, 44 years ago now. I mean, isn’t you know, it’s so important, I think for people to understand how much technology has evolved. You know, all of those are older generation power plants and they had flaws, obviously. And just like so much of our other technology nuclear has advanced tremendously over the last 15, 20 years, hasn’t it?

Amir Adnani [00:14:21] If you go out there today and drive around in a vehicle that was built in the sixties or seventies, or if you go get on an airplane that was built in the sixties or seventies, naturally you might be less comfortable, less safe.

Amir Adnani [00:14:33] I mean, everything has, to your point, advanced so much more on fourth-generation technology and nuclear reactors today. Surely these are far safer and their ability to deal with issues and concerns and have learned from those episodes that you refer to with Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Fukushima.

Amir Adnani [00:14:54] But Fukushima being the most recent one, is a fascinating one to look at because no one died as a result of the shutdown of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors. Thousands of people died because of an earthquake and tsunami and earthquake that wiped. Out. Just cleared that, cleared the area and everything was cleared except those nuclear reactors were left standing,.

Amir Adnani [00:15:14] In a way speaks and is a testament to how solid the engineering is of these reactors that every infrastructure site you would have had in that region was wiped clean and these reactors were left standing. And while there was concern initially about making sure the cooling units that had gone offline would come back online fast enough to keep everything cooled, they got it under control and it was safe.

Amir Adnani [00:15:36] And again, there is no evidence today. That shows there was any fatalities as a result of those reactors coolants malfunctioning before it got under control. That’s a fact. And that is also a fact that is most evidence, again, I think in what the public opinion polls in Japan are saying to you today,.

Amir Adnani [00:15:54] It’s easy for people to sit here in North America debating this stuff. But people in Japan have been pulled recently and they’ve got a democratically elected government who looks at these polls and their conclusion is it’s safe to go back to nuclear energy.

Amir Adnani [00:16:07] And we far rather have access to power that is, that makes life possible rather than having our costs go up, our emissions go up, the environment and the air and the pollution and all those issues that go with the alternatives of not having the power or just not having power at all. Really a hot summer in Japan where they didn’t have access to their AC units, they’re going to have a cold winter and all this stuff seasonally starts to add up.

David Blackmon [00:16:33] And so I’m sorry, go ahead.

Amir Adnani [00:16:34] No, no, that’s it. So I think this is I think it’s instructive to look at Japan, because I think Japan in 11 years has given us a case study, a case study that is more recent than Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, because it involves, you know, the last decade where it again is just a per and data point. We saw what happened there and we see where we are now. And the end result is that there was no harm done by these nuclear reactors and now everyone wants them back.

David Blackmon [00:16:59] Well, and the other thing about Japan, when you look at Japan as an object lesson in a test case, it’s not the landscape in Japan is not favorable for either wind or solar, but a lot of wide open spaces for big solar and wind farms, not a lot of flat spaces with a lot of wind blowing for the wind.

David Blackmon [00:17:16] And then the alternative, as the government made very clear here just a week ago, is the alternative to more nuclear is more coal for Japan. And so they’ve got to keep the lights on somehow. Would you rather have a zero carbon emission source or a heavy polluting source like coal? It seems like a pretty obvious decision point, doesn’t it?

Amir Adnani [00:17:37] Again, I think the decision point that you laid out is exactly would not just the Japanese government, but the European governments, the US government, many governments and policymakers are arriving at the exact same point.

Amir Adnani [00:17:49] And the one thing I would say is there isn’t an energy focused, let’s say, modeling person, these people that model different energy sources and then they provide a report to government people. There isn’t a single one today who has been asked,.

Amir Adnani [00:18:02] Hey, how do we try to be decarbonized? How do we reduce the carbon emissions and give us a plan that involves, you know, getting to net zero or whatever you want to call it, but some kind of decarbonization by 2035 or 2050, there isn’t a single person that has looked at the data and modeled it and hasn’t come up with the conclusion, including nuclear energy.

Amir Adnani [00:18:23] That is the reason why, for the first time last summer, the European Union changed this taxonomy to include both nuclear and natural gas and natural gas should be. And that is why, again, we’re seeing unprecedented support and interest in Washington on a bipartisan basis where they’ve allocated billions of dollars towards providing basically a financial incentive for these nuclear reactors to stay on because of all the financial attributes they bring, they bring grid stability, they provide national security, and it’s 100% emission free. And on top of that, you’re seeing unprecedented action by the government.

Amir Adnani [00:18:56] Not since the 1950s and the Eisenhower administration did we have the US government step up and purchase uranium for what is now being called the Strategic Uranium Reserve, modeled after the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Amir Adnani [00:19:09] I’m very honored that our company was in fact one of the companies that was selected and was awarded by the Department of Energy, and they purchased uranium from us and this completed just a few weeks ago. But it was history in the making.

Amir Adnani [00:19:21] It was history in the making that we have not seen action like this being taken by governments and policymakers in our 20 years as a company. We haven’t seen this. And individuals that work at our company that have been in uranium for 40 years, they go back a long time before you have to find these types of issues.

Amir Adnani [00:19:37] So this all speaks to something. This all speaks to the fact that, again, when you look at the hard, bare facts around what is the benefit of nuclear energy, what are the pros and cons of every power source?

Amir Adnani [00:19:48] Every power source today has pros and cons. We don’t, unfortunately, as a species, as a civilization, we don’t have the perfect solution for our energy needs yet. Maybe we’ll find it 100 years from now. But every form of power generation has its pros and cons. Hence you need an energy mix and then an energy mix.

Amir Adnani [00:20:04] You want to make sure you have nuclear and. And how lucky are we in the US that 94 reactors are already built and operating, that we’re leading the world in the science and technology behind small modular reactors, and that we have the expertise and we have the know-how and we have more than anything the gold standard of safety regulation, which is the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Amir Adnani [00:20:28] All of this should really make people, I think, both feel safe but also proud. And I think if you’re if you’re in your twenties, if you’re like kind of just coming out of college, what better area for for growth and development than to get involved with this small, you know, small modular reactors and the emerging nuclear industry in this country?

Amir Adnani [00:20:45] It used to be that at its peak in the seventies and eighties, when the US was the world’s number one uranium producer, we had almost 30,000 jobs domestically in uranium exploration mining. This is data by the Department of Energy today.

Amir Adnani [00:20:59] There are collectively in the US, including me on this call 300 people involved in domestic uranium exploration mining. So that may seem like, oh my God, we’re in trouble. Only 300. It used to be 30,000. Or you can look at it as glass half full and say it is 300 and it’s got to go to 30,000 because this industry has to get bigger. And with that means tremendous job growth and economic growth and opportunity. That’s the way we’re looking at it.

David Blackmon [00:21:22] And these are not minimum wage jobs, these very high-paid professional positions, correct? Absolutely.

Amir Adnani [00:21:30] And the thing with mining is that once you build a mine, these are ten-year, 15-year, 20-year commitment. So the jobs are also long-lasting jobs. There are stable jobs. They are as long and stable as the duration of the mine lives and assets.

Amir Adnani [00:21:44] So unlike oil and gas, in fact, where it could be more sporadic, where you’re moving from location to location to drill and break, once you have a uranium mine up and running, that location will remain active for a long time. So, again, it’s just it’s the job creation, the amount of their high-paying jobs, but they’re also long-lasting jobs.

David Blackmon [00:22:01] Well, thank you so much. You are an incredible spokesperson for not just your company, but for your industry. And what a great advocate. I really appreciate your time. We’re running up against it here. And any time we can do anything for you, you ever want to come back and talk to us again? Please just reach out and let me know. We’d love to do this again.

Amir Adnani [00:22:21] It would be my honor and I really appreciate that. I’ve been at this for 18 years now, and I really believe with everything in me about the merits of what we’re doing and believed in when it was dark, it was quiet for ten years.

David Blackmon [00:22:34] It wasn’t easy, right?

Amir Adnani [00:22:35] It was not easy. We believed in it. So you can appreciate it. You know, Now we feel this is easy to believe in now, but our resolve was tested during the very kind of dark depths of the bear market that the industry was in for a decade. That’s a long time, obviously.

Amir Adnani [00:22:51] But it goes to show you the level of commitment that we have and truly how we feel about the prospects of the industry and that ultimately it’s providing something necessary and good and something that is going to be energy is life and to be the provider of that and to genuinely believe that you have the supply chain and the fuel that allows for life to move forward and to be progressive and to be continuous, I think is very important.

Amir Adnani [00:23:16] And I think also, again, where we’re very grounded in the convictions we have and really appreciate this opportunity to connect with you and tell our story and look forward to coming back and doing it again.

David Blackmon [00:23:26] And that’s our lesson for the show, folks. Energy security is national security. If we’re going to have energy security, we’re going to need more nuclear. That’s the way it’s going to be. And so so please talk to your local representatives, your folks and in government and tell them you’re in favor of more nuclear energy in the United States.

David Blackmon [00:23:46] It’s important for our future and our kids’ futures and our grandkid’s futures with that. Thank you again, Adani. I really appreciate it and look forward to talking to you again in the future.

Amir Adnani [00:23:56] Likewise. Thank you. Take care. Bye bye,

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