During the 2009-2010 reporting year, Great Southern Kaolin Pty Ltd (GSK)'s activities comprised: - commissioning the pilot plant at the fabrication site in Kingaroy, Qld, in May-June 2010, and processing about 2 t of kaolinised granite through it to determine the basic processing characteristics of Poochera kaolin; - drying of the filter cake produced during the commissioning trial, at ALS Laboratories, Adelaide; - calcining several kilograms of dried filter cake at a commercial pottery (Bennetts Magill in SA); - testing several samples for particle size, colour and brightness at Unimin’s Technical Services Division, Braeside, Victoria; - modifying the pilot plant design to rectify several minor problems encountered during the commissioning stage; - sourcing and leasing a Sedigraph 5100 Particle Size Analyser (with a Microsoft Windows interface controller) and installing it in the pilot plant's laboratory; - conducting an initial series of processing trials using the Kingaroy pilot plant to optimise the blunging, degritting, dispersion and delamination of Carey’s Well kaolin, and to produce a small quantity of hydrous kaolin filtercake that meets a calciner feedstock particle size specification of >90% minus 2 micron fraction; and - designing and commencing construction of a drying, crushing, milling and calcining circuit that is suitable for producing small quantities of hydrous and calcined kaolin products, to submit for initial evaluation by likely customers. Potential clients could be those in the ceramics, paper and paper board, paint, ink, polymer and catalyst (cordierite) manufacturing industries. During the 2010-2011 reporting year, GSK's activities comprised: - establishment and commissioning of a kaolin pilot plant and laboratory at Streaky Bay; - processing bulk samples of Carey's Well kaolinised granite to produce 3 “typical product” samples for preliminary market evaluation; - performing detailed physical and chemical evaluations of “typical product” samples, and preparing Technical Data Sheets and Material Safety Data Sheets for each product; - subjecting these 'typical products' to limited customer evaluation, and obtaining feedback; - undertaking a preliminary aircore drilling programme for kaolin resource definition at Carey’s Well and Tomney East, to further explore the Carey’s Well and Condooringie Well occurrences, and to delineate sterilised ground at Carey’s Well (total of 225 vertical holes put in at 100 m centres); - undertaking the design, construction, installation and commissioning of small scale exploration pilot plant (EPP) at Streaky Bay for testing composite aircore drill cuttings samples; - processing Carey's Well composite drill cuttings samples through the EPP to produce minus 45 micron particle size fraction “kaolin” samples, and performing physical and chemical characterisation of these “kaolin” samples using in-house and external laboratories; - collating data using Vulcan software in order to prepare block model resource estimates for an area of about 96 ha covered by 100 m x 100 m aircore drilling at Carey’s Well; - completing a differential GPS survey over the Carey’s Well area; and - undertaking a flora baseline environmental study in the area around Carey’s Well. During the 2011-2012 reporting year, GSK's activities comprised: - expansion and commissioning of the kaolin pilot plant and laboratory at Streaky Bay to include a separately housed dry pilot plant including comminution and calcining facilities, and additional instrumentation in the laboratory; - processing and testing of kaolinised granite from Carey's Well bulk samples to produce several hydrous and calcined “typical product” samples for preliminary market evaluation, and further detailed physical and chemical evaluation of “typical product” samples leading to the preparation of provisional Technical Data Sheets for each product. Selected high grade hydrous products (~90% 80. The current measured resource contains kaolin having a range of raw ISO brightness values and iron and titanium contents. A major exploration target for the Poochera Kaolin Project, incorporating five known deposits (Condooringie Well, Carey’s Well, Tootla, Karcultaby South and Tomney) that are located within EL 4575 but outside of and less than 10 km away from the Carey’s Well measured resource area, was announced by Minotaur to the ASX on 3/5/2012. It is estimated at 570 to 810 Mt of white kaolinised granite containing 40% to 60% minus 45 micron kaolin (kaolinite ± halloysite) with high ISO Brightness (R457 >=80). During the 2012-2013 reporting year, GSK's activities included trial dry processing of kaolinised granite. Analysis from the initial testwork showed that a screened product containing around 80% kaolin is possible, however independent trials undertaken by Allied Mineral Laboratories indicated that dry screening is much less efficient than wet screening due to kaolin adherance to quartz grains and kaolin agglomerations. However, it was also noted that the feldspar content of the screened sample was unusually high, suggesting that the small sub-sample taken for the screening trial was not representative. A preliminary analysis of halloysite distribution within the Carey’s Well deposit was also undertaken. Halloysite is chemically the same as kaolin but has a ‘tubular’ particle shape/habit which alters the physical properties of the kaolin product and can affect the usage in certain applications. Block modeling was undertaken on 76 past drillholes with halloysite analyses to hand, which showed that there is significant horizontal variation in halloysite abundance, although this may be an artefact of the sporadic 3D sampling and the spatial distribution of drillholes. It was realised that to be able to effectively analyse and model the halloysite distribution at Carey’s Well, the entire downhole length of kaolinised granite in every hole needed to be analysed, and more detail would be required in the X and Y dimensions, i.e. further infill / extension drilling. In 2013, Adelaide Brighton Cement Ltd (ABC) commenced investigations into the potential for kaolinised granite from Carey’s Well to be used for manufacture of cement clinker. Initial work comprised re-analysis of samples from Minotaur’s 2008 bulk sample drillholes and 2011 aircore drillholes. All tested holes lay within a zone of low salinity in the north-eastern portion of the Carey’s Well measured resource. Re-analysis confirmed that kaolinised granite from this low salinity zone was chemically suitable for cement manufacture, although material in the basal parts of most holes exhibited unacceptably high levels of potash. Some infill RC drilling of a low halite content zone within the Carey’s Well deposit (27 vertical holes for 887 m) was undertaken by ABC in mid-September 2013 in order to ascertain the suitability of kaolin from there for its cement clinker making application. All 1-metre depth interval drill cuttings samples from these RC holes were laboratory analysed by XRF spectrometry for major elements. Based on the analytical results, a bulk sampling programme was designed to obtain 60-70 t of kaolinised granite to send for for kiln trials at the Angaston cement plant. This bulk sampling was undertaken in late 2013 using a Calweld drill rig from Coober Pedy. Again, all ~1-metre drill depth interval samples were analysed chemically and, based on the results, a 60 t parcel of the Caldwell extracted samples was selected and transported to Angaston. Another 10 t was rejected, generally because of low (1mm) was significantly reduced. Clearly, the pebble milling both “brushes” some kaolin off the quartz grains and results in some break up of “coarse” kaolinite stacks. Repeated pebble milling of the coarse fraction, after screening, would result in further release of kaolin fines and thus improve kaolin recovery. Mineralogies of all milled and screened fractions, calculated from XRF chemical analysis, showed that in all cases the minus 106 micron fraction is 95–99% kaolin ± mica. Dry classification at 100 microns would produce a marketable ceramic grade kaolin, but recoveries are unacceptably low (<10%) and would need to be improved by repeated milling and dry classification of the oversize. Dry classification trials were also carried out using an air centrifuge pilot plant operated by Imptec at Hope Forest, South Australia, which confirmed that marketable kaolin product can be produced from Carey’s Well kaolinised granite by air classification at 100 microns, but recoveries are generally low. However, air classification of pebble milled kaolinised granite with 60–70% minus 45 micron “kaolin” resulted in the recovery of from 38% to 100% of the desired minus 100 micron “product”, which indicated that reprocessing (repeat pebble milling and air classification) could result in commercially viable recovery of kaolin that could be marketed directly to ceramic manufacturers. Subsequent trials aimed at comparing the outputs achievable by wet screening versus dry screening showed that wet screening recovers practically all of the -45 micron “kaolin” to the -106 micron fraction, whereas in dry screened samples 88% of kaolin in the feed remains distributed through all coarser fractions. Clearly the action of merely low to moderate water pressure effectively washes off all kaolin adhering to quartz grains and breaks up kaolin aggregates so that <5% of the kaolin remains in the +106 micron fractions, they being essentially clean quartz. This finding, and the necessity to avoid reprocessing of plant throughput as much as possible, meant that washing and wet screening remained the preferred processing route for development of the Carey’s Well kaolin deposit. During the 2014-2015 reporting year, product optimisation studies for bulk samples of Carey’s Well kaolin were continued. In November 2014, four clay samples, each of about 100 kg, were prepared at the Streaky Bay pilot plant and despatched to OPF Enterprises of Houston, USA for evaluation of the clay's usefulness in the preparation of lightweight ceramic proppants (LWP). In March 2015, OPF forwarded sub-samples of two hydrous samples (8601 and 8602) to the Bishop Materials Laboratory at the National Brick Research Centre, Clemson University, South Carolina for analysis by XRD, XRF, simultaneous thermal analysis and SEM. Results for the two Carey’s Well samples were compared with published properties for two commercially available benchmark Georgia kaolins (Brooks, Allen) widely used for preparation of the LWP formulations 'Carbolite' and 'Carbo Econoprop'. Seven samples of metakaolin provided by Great Southern Kaolin were used by Adelaide University researchers to prepare trial proppants. Proppant crush testing was undertaken by Lab SA (Field and Laboratory Testing Services). Additional testwork was undertaken at Minotaur’s Streaky Bay pilot plant to establish likely kaolin fines recoveries for both dry- and wet semi-processing.