Guyana Granted Uranium Rights in 2024. The Country Found Out in 2026.
Resources
Key Facts
—The project. Kurupung, in Region Seven, spans 92.2 square kilometres and holds a historical estimate of 20.6 million pounds of uranium.
—The owner. Canada’s U92 Energy Corp, established in 2024, gained control by buying a Singaporean company.
—The timeline. Exclusive prospecting licences were granted in April 2024. The public learned of the project through the press in April 2026.
—The response. U92 is now running a social-media campaign on nuclear safety and benefits as criticism grows.
—The critics. A former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and opposition MPs want a national debate.
—The data. U92 paid about half a million Canadian dollars, in its own shares, for exploration data French geologists compiled in the 1980s.
The Guyana uranium project has an education campaign running this week, roughly two years after the exclusive licences were signed and drilling data started being gathered.
U92 Energy Corp, a Canadian company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange, has been posting material on environmental management, safety and the benefits of nuclear power.
It is doing so because concerns are mounting. The order of those events is the story.
How the Guyana uranium project reached a Canadian balance sheet
Follow the corporate chain, because it does not run in a straight line. A Singaporean company called Arafura Oeste was incorporated in November 2020 and renamed LIA Industries in December 2022.
In March 2023 it set up a Guyanese subsidiary. Thirteen months later, in April 2024, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission granted that subsidiary the exclusive right of occupation and exploration over Kurupung.
Exploration began the same year. In June 2025 U92, which had been established in 2024, signed a binding agreement to buy the Singaporean parent, and completed that acquisition earlier this year.
So a Canadian company bought a Singaporean company in order to hold a Guyanese licence. Kurupung is U92’s only project, and it is the only known uranium project in the country.
Two years between the licence and the news
The licences were issued on the nineteenth of April 2024. Guyanese readers learned the project existed when Kaieteur News reported it at the end of April 2026.
That is a gap of about seven hundred and forty days, or almost exactly two years. During it, exclusive rights over the country’s only uranium deposit were granted, exploration commenced, and control passed to a foreign buyer.
Every subsequent step has followed publication rather than preceded it. The opposition demanded a national conversation in June, and the education campaign began this month.
Public engagement is arriving last in a sequence where it usually arrives first. That is the substance of what the critics are actually objecting to, whatever the merits of the geology.
Who is objecting, and why
The most awkward voice for the company belongs to Dr Vincent Adams, the former head of Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency. Opposition MP Sharma Solomon has written publicly asking the government to inform the nation properly.
The recurring criticism is about experience rather than ideology. U92 was established in 2024, has this project as its sole focus, and has no track record in mining uranium or anything else anywhere in the world.
Uranium extraction is among the most demanding forms of mining environmentally, carrying risks from radioactive dust, radon gas and water-borne contamination that persist across very long timescales. Critics argue a first-time operator is an odd fit for that.
The company’s counterargument, made in May, is that the project’s location reduces those concerns. The natural resources minister has said there are no current plans for other uranium projects.
The French data, bought in paper
One transaction captures the economics neatly. In June, U92 agreed to buy the complete historical technical and exploration dataset for Kurupung, closing the deal after exchange approval for five hundred thousand Canadian dollars, about three hundred and fifty-two thousand American.
It paid in shares rather than cash, issuing 1,030,927 common shares at a deemed price of forty-eight and a half cents to an arm’s-length vendor, subject to a four-month hold.
Consider what that data represents. The French state company Cogema found the mineralisation between 1979 and 1984, drilling 41,334 metres across 291 holes on fourteen targets, hunting the unconformity-type deposits that made Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin famous.
Divide the price by the metres and the dataset cost roughly twelve Canadian dollars per metre that Cogema drilled, paid in a junior explorer’s own paper. Forty years of French state geology, acquired for the price of a modest house, without cash leaving the building.
The market likes it. In June the project was named among the top five investment opportunities at a Bermuda capital event, and fifteen uranium targets have since been identified.
The pitch to investors writes itself: a structural supply deficit, a global nuclear revival, and what U92 calls a pro-mining government. For a country already running the fastest-growing economy on earth on oil, a second extractive boom is being offered before the first has been fully accounted for.
Who owns the Guyana uranium project?
U92 Energy Corp, a Canadian company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange and established in 2024, which acquired the Singaporean firm LIA Industries to gain control. The licence itself is held by LIA’s Guyanese subsidiary, incorporated in Georgetown in March 2023.
How large is the deposit?
The historical resource estimate is twenty and a half million pounds of uranium across roughly ninety-two square kilometres, split between about ten and a half million pounds indicated and ten million inferred. The exploration licences also cover other radioactive minerals and rare earth elements, and run for three years.
Why is it controversial?
Because exclusive rights were granted in April 2024 but the public only learned of the project through press reporting two years later, and the operator has no prior mining track record. A former environmental regulator and opposition MPs have called for national debate before the project advances further.
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