Thor Energy plc (LON:THR) Chief Executive Officer Andrew Hume caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the company’s transformative strategic shift, focusing on natural hydrogen and helium, alongside recent commercial agreements, and upcoming exploration milestones.
Q1: Thor’s been busy in the commercial space recently with several exciting agreements being announced. Andrew, can you provide an overview of those deals?
A1: It’s been a very busy time on the commercial front, which is great. Three deals to give you some information about:
The first, which we announced in mid-July, was to sell 75% of our USA portfolio to Metals One, a UK listed company but mostly focused on uranium. It’s a really good deal; we end up with about $2.2 million of consideration for the 75% equity and then we’re fully carried on the remaining 25%. So, that licence is now with Metals One and in very good hands to move it forward.
The second one also relates to the same acreage. Really exciting and slightly different deal with an American company called DISA, who have proprietary techniques to look at tailings piles, the waste piles, if you like, from mines, and in this part of the world it’s uranium. So, they’re able to take the tailings from activity in the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s and such, reprocess it and extract up to about 90% of the remaining uranium ore, along with some other metals as well potentially. Of course, what it does is it leaves those tailings a lot cleaner, a lot more environmentally friendly for the people and the environment in that area. That uranium can then be obviously sold for profit.
Part of our deal is that we end up with a sliding scale royalty consideration upon the sales in the region of 1-4%. This is just to stay focused on the tailings on the surface, it has nothing to do with any of the underground rights or other things relating to the licence. So, really nice feel-good story, if you like, that gives us a revenue stream as well.
The third one to mention is, and the largest of the three, is our Molyhil asset in Northern Territories. We just sold out 75% equity in that to TIVAN for consideration of AU$6.5 million. We end up with about AU$3 million of that by the end of the year and each September we get an extra AU$1.3 million in direct consideration. So, again, it takes that asset, which was a very high-quality asset, and puts it into the hands of TIVAN, who have a lot of infrastructure and have some major plans for that part of Northern Territories. It gives real good custodianship of the licence whilst also providing funds for Thor to pursue its hydrogen exploration books.
Q2: These deals demonstrate significant progress to fulfil Thor’s ambitious and transformative strategy. Can you provide an overview of that strategy for us and the progress being made?
A2: Back about a year ago, mid-2024, the Board looked at our portfolio and recognised that there’s lots of good assets in there, but also quite diverse and disparate assets as well; geographically, geologically, and also the kind of minerals we were looking for.
We recognised that it was just lacking that synergies and giving us that strong backbone of assets to move in the right direction. At the same time, the company decided to pivot into natural hydrogen and helium and that’s involved us bringing new staff in who were more focused on that natural hydrogen and helium side of things, with the skill sets that are required.
It’s involved us picking up our 80.2% holding of the GO Exploration licence, which gives us our South Australian portfolio, one of the best in a global sense.
The third part has been what we’ve just been discussing, which is to look at our existing metals portfolio and find the right future for all those assets, whether they remain within the company, or whether we divest, in part or completely to other parties.
The benefits of that, of course, are to put the asset in the right hands, to reduce our cost base to practically zero, and to also allow us to focus our resources on natural hydrogen and helium, and then to take the profits of any of the sales, obviously, to fuel our work progress.
Q3: Okay, so with Thor’s full focus, and with the funding now in place, what does the next year look like for Thor Energy?
A3: Well, it’s great. We’re realising in the region of about $6 million mostly before Christmas, but by mid next year. From these deals, that money goes straight away into funding our exploration programme through more geochemical programme work that we’re going to do in November, which picks up from the work we did in May. It’s going to give us a lot more data density and allow us to focus in on three or four hotspots that we’ve identified in the acreage. These areas are going to be where we’ll subsequently shoot 2D seismic, which we’re hoping to do in Q2 next year, depending on timing and availability of resources.
That’s going to give us really the first view into the subsurface in our area in order to identify prospectivity, drilling targets, and so on and so forth. Straight from that, we flesh out our drill programming with the idea that hopefully towards the end of next year, we’ll be drilling two wells in the area.
So, it’s the same programme we’ve discussed in the past. It’s now really starting to take shape. We’ve started to bring staff in and staff up the right skill sets and specialists to move the programme forward. So, strategy from 2024 on all these multiple sort of pillars are all starting to pull together and allowing us to focus 100% on the natural hydrogen and helium exploration in South Australia.
