The Lochiel North coal deposit was taken under licence to allow for an evaluation of the known coal seams' potential for significant upgrading of their contained thermal energy, through the application of a proprietary autoclave heating process under development in the United States of America. During the first licence year, in July-August 2011, the licensee's parent company WPG Resources drilled a single large diameter vertical open rotary mud and diamond cored hole in the centre of the Lochiel North coal deposit. The hole was precollared from the surface to 71.54 m depth using rotary mud drilling equipment, and then was cored continuously in PQ size to a total depth of 123.10 m. It intersected all 12 of the known seams of low rank lignitic brown coal, from which 12 individual ply samples of the recovered core were removed and sent to Wyoming for testing in the Evergreen Energy, Inc. test facility at Gillette. The seams as cored ranged in thickness from 0.05 m to 3.00 m. After drilling was completed, wireline geophysical logging of the hole was carried out for WPG Resources by the SA Department for Water. In the USA, three composite coal sample subsets were thermally processed by Evergreen Energy using their K-Fuel® technology, before the upgraded products and a representative feed sample were sent to an independent third party laboratory for undergoing conventional coal analysis and determination of their post-combustion ash composition. The test results showed that the K-Fuel process removed a significant amount of bound-in moisture from the raw coal sample, resulting in a large (> 30%) increase in heating value. During the following four years of tenure, no field work was done. All further technical study progress was halted due to the consequences of bankruptcy proceedings that befell Evergreen Energy in 2012. A full surrender of the licence was applied for near the end of Year 5.