EL 24726 Ammaroo Phosphate Project Partial relinquishment report

Abstract

The Ammaroo Phosphate Project is located 240 km southeast of Tennant Creek. The project area contains the 40 km-long, billion-tonne Ammaroo Phosphate Deposit (partly on EL 24726), which is currently Australia's largest JORC phosphate resource, the satellite Ammaroo South resource (on EL 25185), the Rockhole prospect, and, as yet untested, greenfields potential in the east. EL 24726 contains an ML application. The overall Ammaroo Phosphate Project prefeasibility has been announced. A voluntary partial relinquishment of 22 sub-blocks from 240 was made from EL 24726, leaving 218 sub-blocks or 696.4 km2. This is part of a rationalisation of tenure between the Ammaroo Resource and the railway and is the second voluntary reduction of EL 24726 during 2014. There has been no on-ground work what-so-ever on this area because drilling on the area retained and on adjacent ELs in the project has demonstrated that the sub-blocks being relinquished have little prospect for phosphate. The areas relinquished also have three large CLC indigenous cultural exclusion zones impinging upon them. These effectively sterilise more than half the sub-blocks being relinquished and render the remaining areas too small to justify retention.