EL 29954 Barney Creek 1 Project Area, Relinquishment report 2017

Abstract

Ripple Resources is a fully owned subsidiary of Armour Energy Ltd. Armour has been exploring the gas and oil resources of the McArthur Basin, and has made a significant gas discovery in the Glyde sub basin. Ripple has selected Exploration Licences within areas inside the Armour Energy permits, and has been cooperating with Armour to evaluate these EL's for their base metal potential. This cooperation has involved modifications and extensions to the Armour program so that it has greater relevance for base metal exploration. Ripple and Armour are taking a basin - wide approach, using expensive large scale geophysical geochemical and geological studies in order to select the optimal targets for expensive deep drilling. Future work will become more separated. Base metal exploration within these Licences is challenging because of the rugged topography and cover geology. Breccia hosted and stratiform mineralisation trends into the area from outcropping areas, the most notable being the Bald Hills - HYC trend and Western Emu fault. The imputed depths of mineralisation are believed to range from about 200m - 1000m, much of which is below the limit of airborne EM penetration. Previous exploration by Amoco Minerals (and Petroleum) and by BHP RTZ and MIM relied on airborne EM as a target generating technique. Amoco found outcropping Barney Creek shales and breccias in what was named the Glyde sub basin. Subsequent drilling found little evidence of proximal hydrothermal sulphide deposition in the sub basin, although it did encounter gas flows. Very little is known about the Barney Creek formation away from the Amoco drill holes. No field work was conducted within the 51 surrendered sub blocks. A Falcon gravity survey covered part of three blocks. A basin wide Frogtech study was conducted. The blocks surrendered in EL 29954 lay within an area of subcropping Tawallah and lower McArthur Group. This area has low prospectivity, based on very sparse evidence.