Uranium explorer Greenvale Energy spent about 90 per cent of its working capital in Queensland last year but will be directing its spending into the Northern Territory in 2026.

Greenvale Energy (ASX: GRV) managing director Alex Cheeseman said the company had not spent a dollar on its Oasis uranium project, 250km west of Townsville, this year as it was not incentivised or supported to do so.

“We’re only a small player, but in terms of an approach and a mindset, that’s money that’s not going into northern Queensland,” he said.

“It’s going into central NT. We employed all local contractors (in Queensland last year) – drillers, technical supervision, earthworks crews, even staying in the local service station.”

Image at top of page: Drilling at the Oasis project in North Queensland in 2025.

He said the company had been working with others under the AMEC banner to get some dialogue going with the Queensland Government on uranium after the LNP came into power.

“If I’m honest, that hasn’t progressed very far, and it was quite disheartening from our point of view in terms of there being a very strong pro-mining kind of rhetoric that’s coming out of the premier’s office, but we haven’t seen much or any support to really engage in meaningful conversation about uranium,” he said.

Mr Cheeseman said the company was still keen on the Oasis project’s potential, but he had to think about where each dollar was best spent.

“At the moment, hanging on a policy change is not something a junior exploration company can do. We have to try to find the path of least resistance, I suppose.”

Related: Paladin highlights limiting forces in uranium agreement

Mr Cheeseman said the company carried out a lot of investor engagement, and people expressed disbelief that Queensland was not opening up the opportunity to create mines for a commodity that it hosted in abundance and that was vital for future energy needs.

“We face the same thing in Western Australia. There’s a pretty strongly held Labor Party policy on not supporting uranium mining,” he said.

“The Liberal Party (in WA), although they are a very severe minority, have come out already with a pro-uranium, lift-the-mining-ban policy that they’ll take into the next election.”

With a number of major economies globally looking increasingly to nuclear energy, Mr Cheeseman said that if they were not buying uranium from Australia, chances were they would source it from jurisdictions that did not work within the same sort of rigorous controls.

Greenvale Energy kicked off its NT-focused exploration field season last month with an extensive new airborne geophysical survey at the Thunderball uranium project in the Pine Creek region.