Carnarvon Petroleum has been awarded a new oil permit located within the Bonaparte Basin on Western Australia’s North West Shelf.
The permit covers a 1512 kilometre area within the Southern Vulcan sub-basin, and Carnarvon has identified several Jurassic leads over multiple shallow reservoir levels.
The Bonaparte Basin has already been privy to several successful finds, including the Montara, Jabiru and Challis oil fields (the first is run by PTTEP and suffered a prominent spill in 2009, while the latter two were decommissioned by PTTEP in 2013).
Adrian Cook, managing director at Carnarvon was pleased with the Vulcan permit, the company’s first in the region, and said he looked forward to seeing the prospect evolve to a drilling stage.
[This permit] is another demonstration of our team’s ability to acquire oil prone exploration permits within proven petroleum systems,” he explained. “Given the shallow water depths, jack-up drilling is possible, meaning the potential for lower cost drilling and field developments.”
Carnarvon stated that the area also harbours potential for Late Cretaceous secondary drilling ongoing technical investigation.