Three adjoining licence areas that were centred approximately 480 km north-west of Ceduna together occupied the northern section of the Ooldea Range over a stepped NW-SE trending outline having an average width of 25 km and a combined total length of 220 km. The Maralinga Aboriginal community lay 8 km to the east of EL 3616, while the Oak Valley Aboriginal community lay 20 km north-east of EL 3615. These ground parcels were taken up to explore a section of the Ooldea Range palaeogeomorphic shoreline beach barrier feature for possible buried heavy mineral sands (HM) marine placer accumulations, similar to what licensee Lost Sands' parent company Diatreme Resources had found at the Cyclone deposit in the Western Australian portion of the Eucla Basin. The aim of coming into SA to explore was to re-evaluate the outcome from a similar previous exploration project carried out by BHP during the early 1990s, when 11 traverses perpendicular to a 170 km strike length of the Ooldea Range were drilled by 223 holes. Isolated instances of high grades (20% HM) were encountered then but appeared to be mainly goethite, while several other low-grade anomalous zones were encountered, all at levels 20 m to 40 m below the surface, these being deemed uneconomic. Work during the initial licence year started with the conduct of Aboriginal cultural heritage protection surveys along existing tracks plus 281 km of newly constructed tracks, followed in September 2006 by the acquisition of trial ground magnetic surveys totalling 1968 line km that covered the north-eastern part of EL 3614 and the western part of EL 3615 and were designed to outline a number of probable zircon and ilmenite-rich strandline targets. In-house gridded imaging of the ground magnetic data vaguely indicated the presence of several anomalies that roughly paralleled the postulated strike of the ancient shorelines which was derived by examination of the digital terrain model and BHP's previous drilling results, but there was a lot of noise in the data which hampered the interpretation. Over the period October-December 2006, an exploratory aircore traverse drilling campaign was performed on EL 3614 over the Willy Willy prospect, when 168 vertical open NQ holes were completed along traverses 500 m apart for a total penetration of 6949 m. This drilling of magnetic targets failed to find significant HM mineralisation, and Lost Sands therefore sought help from consultants to try to resolve if more subtle trends could be recognised in the ground magnetic data. The reply was affirmative, so it was decided to continue with drilling magnetic anomalies in the Ooldea Sand using more closely spaced traverses. During licence Year 2, two separate campaigns of exploratory aircore traverse drilling were undertaken, one in October–November 2007 and the other in May-July 2008, for an overall addition of 296 holes totalling 13,177.5 m that were put in on all three subject licences. These holes were drilled generally at 1 km intervals along thirteen regional traverses spaced from 8 km to 35 km apart, with a limited amount of infill holes put in at closer spacings of 500 m to 200 m apart. A lot of useful regional stratigraphic information was obtained, including observations about the distribution and apparent influence for HM entrapment of lateritic palaeosurfaces, but again the target Ooldea Sand beach facies sediments proved to be largely barren of HM, or else had a mostly trashy mineral assemblage and were of low grade (30 m) beach sequence developed on the seaward face of the Ooldea Range. Three discrete sub-parallel NW-SE trending mineralised strandline zones 2 to 3 km apart have been intersected within the foreshore facies, although estimated HM values are generally low (below 1%) and it appeared that the assemblage is dominated by titanium bearing minerals. Infill drilling at 200 m hole spacing, closing down to 100 m spacing, was completed in the latest campaign to delineate the zones. The central strandline is the best developed of the three, comprising visible HM mineralisation with an average width of 500 m and thickness of 12 m over a 9 km strike length. The mineralisation commences around 25 m below surface within a well-developed beach sand sequence, with best mineralisation occurring immediately above a coarse-grained to gritty surf zone. However, the samples' laboratory assay results were surprisingly disappointing in that the grade was considerably lower than that estimated from sample panning in the field. Some of the best intercepts returned were 21 m @ 2.5% HM from 18 m depth in hole MA468, 13.5m @ 1.5% HM from 39 m depth in MA428, and 9 m @ 1.8% HM from 31.5 m depth in MA489. A large but low grade beach strandline system had clearly been found, but the presence of a continuous high grade (>5% HM) core had not yet been established by the infill drilling. The Irish Well resource was estimated on a non-JORC basis from available data as being 90.1 Mt @ 1.7% HM, for 1.5 Mt of contained HM at a cutoff grade of 1% HM, and at this time was classified as an Inferred Resource. It was estimated using Micromine software by wireframing cross-section outlines of mineralisation, generating a block model and interpolating grade by the inverse distance cubed method. Two composite drill cuttings samples from Irish Well were submitted during 2011 for QEMSCAN mineralogical analysis of their HM content. Both samples were taken from Strandline B as this represents the bulk of the mineralisation present. From this preliminary work it was apparent that the Irish Well mineral assemblage is quite different from that at Cyclone or Jacinth-Ambrosia, and is dominated by high Ti content species with accessory leucoxene and zircon. The HM appeared to be quite clean, both visually and as shown by QEMSCAN, and it is also relatively coarse grained, with QEMSCAN reporting average grain sizes of >160 microns. Levels of siliceous Ti-oxides are also quite low relative to Cyclone, and thus the combination of all these mineral characteristics suggested that that Irish Well HM should display high separation efficiencies (i.e. high recovery) and generate high quality mineral products. Following a review of exploration data gathered across the three subject tenement areas, Lost Sands decided not to renew tenure for another 5-year term over a significant portion of the combined tenement holding. This portion includes BHP's Willy Willy prospect within EL 3614, as detailed sachet logging of all the drill cuttings recovered from appraisal drilling done there suggests that the HM mineralisation predominantly comprises iron oxides and other trash minerals. In total, it was decided to partially relinquish all of EL 3614 (Eucla Basin Area 2), the northern 71% of EL 3615 (Area 3) and 8.2% in the southern part of EL 3616 (Area 4). With respect to the retained ground, the inferred presence of basement highs near the common south-western boundary of ELs 3615 and 3616 and the apparent development of a Tertiary beach sequence on the seaward side of these highs (notably shown by the results of drilling done on Lines 1, 4 and 5) indicated some potential for an offshore barrier sandbar system to exist on the seaward side of the present-day surficial large continental dune field. This setting was considered by Lost Sands to be quite prospective, however, the majority of the ground over it was already held by Iluka Resources. During licence Year 6, following the renewal of two of the licences over reduced areas, Lost Sands did no field work, but carried out an economic review of the HM potential of ELs 5271 and 5272. This concluded that two significant occurrences of buried HM mineralisation had been discovered by the company, but neither possessed the needed attribute of a high value mineral assemblage to allow for viable mine development under current and forecast short to medium term market conditions. The receipt of all outstanding laboratory assay data for the Irish Well HM occurrence enabled an interim geological model to be built and resource financial analysis to be undertaken. The adverse finding of the latter was impacted primarily by the high volumes of overburden at each of the mineralised strandlines, leading to the calculation of a 6:1 overburden to ore ratio, that if mined would incur significant overburden handling costs. The geometry of the strandlines was updated, such that they now had strike lengths of up to 13.5 km and widths up to 600 m, but their average grade remained around 1.7% HM, made up mostly of ilmenite. During licence year 7, no further work was done, and tenure of both ELs was fully surrendered in August 2013.