EL 25184 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 25184), 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 25184 contains an ML application. The overall Ammaroo Phosphate Project prefeasibility has been announced. A voluntary partial relinquishment of 28 sub-blocks from 91 was made from EL 25184. This is part of a rationalisation of tenure between the Ammaroo Resource and the railway and is the second voluntary reduction of EL 25184 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 are too far into the basin to be prospective. The basin-edge facies of the Arthur Creek Formation which hosts the phosphate are unlikely to be present and even if there was phosphate present, it would be prohibitively deep for open-pit mining (probably >150 m). The area relinquished also has seven CLC indigenous cultural exclusion zones impinging upon it. These effectively sterilise more than half the sub-blocks being relinquished and render the remaining areas too small to justify retention.