| WHALES ON THE NET - http://www.whales.org.au the Online Voice of WHALES IN DANGER (WID) |
| BACK | HOMEPAGE | Eastern Strandings | TOP |
| Copyright Notice |  |
| Home > Back > Eastern Strandings >Off-Shore Oil Exploration - Sydney Basin | SITEMAP |
|
Off-Shore Oil Exploration to Start near Sydney In early 2004 Bounty Oil & Gas along with the UK-based company Electro Silica Plc. Electro Silica will fund the acquisition of 1,500 km of 2D seismic over the northern area of their offshore Sydney Basin permit (PEP11) to validate prospects matured by Bounty following its recent technical studies. Bounty's satellite imagery studies have indicated the presence of repeatable hydrocarbon seeps within the permit and will focus its efforts on an area which has the potential to contain 1.2 Tcf of recoverable gas. This is enough gas to supply Sydney's gas requirements at the current consumption rate for the next 15 years. Due to its proximity to the east coast's major populated areas, gas discovered in this basin will have a significant commercial advantage over other projects planned to deliver gas to these regions.The seismic acquisition was originally planned for the first quarter of 2003, but had to be postponed due to delays in obtaining government approvals to undertake the program. Bounty was subsequently granted a 12-month extension to that permit year (Permit Year 3) to account for the delay. The Offshore Sydney Basin is a totally untested, but highly prospective, basin situated along the heavily populated and industrialised central coast of New South Wales, Australia. No drilling has taken place in the basin, despite a significant number of wells drilled in the adjacent onshore Sydney Basin, which have flowed gas or encountered oil shows. Covered by PEP 11, a 200 km long, 2,000,000-acre permit, the Offshore Sydney Basin is a significant exploration area with large scale structuring and potentially multi-Tcf gas and condensate-charged Triassic and Permian reservoirs. Mapped prospects and leads are generally located less than 50 km from Australia's largest energy market, the Sydney-Wollongong-Newcastle greater metropolitan area - a population centre of approximately 5,000,000 people. Bounty has identified the "Biggus" prospect (formerly named "South Baleen") as a major target. Located in the northern sector of the permit in an average of 125 m of water, Biggus is situated on the crest of the Offshore Uplift on a thrusted anticline. With a closure of over 30,000 acres (120 km2) and 300 milliseconds of vertical relief, the feature has potential to hold up to 1.2 Tcf of recoverable gas. Bounty has reprocessed seismic and aeromagnetic data to mature the mapping in the area. The prospectivity of the northern sector has been further enhanced by the confirmation of the presence of apparent hydrocarbon seeps. Originally detected on 1996 satellite imagery, a repeat analysis of 1998 and 2001 images again identified apparent seeps directly over the main prospect. The total depth of a well to test this prospect would be approximately 1,500m. http://www.gtp.com.au/bountyoil/ Bounty Oil & Gas NL - Annual Report 2003 |
|
||||||||||||||