Uranium Energy Starts Burke Hollow Production, Expands U.S. Uranium Supply

Uranium Energy Corp began production at Burke Hollow in Bee County, Texas, on April 8 after receiving approval from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, giving the company a fresh operating mine at a moment when Washington and Texas are both pushing harder on domestic fuel security. UEC called the project the newest in-situ recovery uranium mine in the world and the first new U.S. ISR operation to start in more than a decade.

The start matters because Burke Hollow is not being presented as a stand-alone mine. UEC is folding it into a hub-and-spoke model built around the Hobson Central Processing Plant, where production from Burke Hollow will be processed. Hobson is licensed to produce up to 4 million pounds of uranium per year, giving the South Texas network a real industrial backbone as UEC tries to scale beyond a single wellfield.

UEC says Burke Hollow has been a long runway project, moving from a grassroots discovery in 2012 to production in 2026, a 14-year buildout that now gives the company two active ISR production platforms in the United States. The company’s next step is already on the calendar: Ludeman, another ISR project, is planned for startup in 2027. UEC says its Texas hub-and-spoke system now serves five satellite ISR project areas across the Texas Uranium Belt, tying Burke Hollow to a broader regional production base rather than a one-off opening.

The company is also leaning on the scale of what remains in the ground. UEC says only about half of Burke Hollow’s roughly 20,000-acre property has been explored, and independent reporting has put the project’s estimated resource at about 6.155 million pounds of U3O8. Texas Governor Greg Abbott went further, calling Burke Hollow America’s largest greenfield ISR uranium production project, a label that underscores how central the site has become to the state’s uranium pitch.

The political framing around the startup was just as direct. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said uranium production is a foundation of a secure domestic nuclear fuel cycle, and UEC cast the launch as part of rebuilding a U.S. supply chain that can rely less on non-Russian sources. That is the real test for Burke Hollow now: whether this first new ISR mine in years becomes a symbolic restart or the start of a broader U.S. supply rebound. Some market reports said UEC shares moved higher in premarket trading after the announcement, a sign that investors saw the same thing.