Petroleum Opportunities

Petroleum opportunities

The objective of NTGS petroleum programs is to improve the understanding of the petroleum systems in onshore and offshore sedimentary basins and to prepare updated information packages on petroleum prospectivity in order to encourage oil and gas exploration.

Onshore:

The Northern Territory contains four major onshore sedimentary basins which are prospective for hydrocarbons - Amadeus, Georgina, Wiso and the stacked Eromanga/Pedirka Basins.

Of these basins, only the Amadeus is producing through Mereenie and Palm Valley gasfields. Further information is obtainable at the Petroleum section of the web page of Minerals & Energy. The onshore basins are considered to be underexplored by national and global standards, having collectively attracted less than 10,000 km of seismic and only 112 exploration wells.

Large areas of prospective acreage are available in all four major onshore basins. Details of tenure applications and requirements can be sourced from Petroleum Titles. Statutory petroleum exploration reports, well completion reports, logs, sismic data and geophysical reports are indexed in the Industry Reports Management System (IRMS), and data can be requested from the Minerals and Energy Information Centre (geoscience.info@nt.gov.au)

Current NTGS petroleum projects address the Amadeus, Georgina and Eromanga/Pedirka Basins.

NTGS provides an annual review of the hydrocarbon potential of onshore basins. The most recent version is: Ambrose G and Marshall T, 2005. Northern Territory of Australia, Onshore hydrocarbon potential, 2005. NTGS Record 2005-002 (CD ROM). Also available free are basin studies for the Amadeus, Wiso, Georgina, Ngalia, Arafura, Eromanga and Bonaparte basins which can be requested via the Minerals and Energy Information Centre.

Central Australian Basins Symposium (CABS)

The Symposium focused on the petroleum and mineral potential of a number of central Australian basins, and provided a forum for representatives from industry, government and academia.

State Geological Surveys, Geoscience Australia and university researchers undertake important project work and regional geological/geophysical surveys in central Australian basins. For a number of reasons, the petroleum/minerals exploration effort in many of these basins has not been commensurate with their potential. A major aim of the symposium was to review recent progress in order to marry key petroleum and minerals exploration strategies for the benefit of both industries.

Offshore:

NTGS is committed to supporting exploration in offshore areas of the Territory. In 2003, NTGS hosted a major conference, the very successful Timor Sea Symposium, focusing on the highly prospective Bonaparte and Browse basins, and culminating in the release of a proceedings volume, containing 32 fully refereed papers from industry, academia and government. This is now the definitive volume on the geology and hydrocarbon resources of the Timor Sea. The full reference is: Ellis GK, Baillie PW and Munson TJ (editors), 2004. 'Timor Sea Petroleum Geoscience. Proceedings of the Timor Sea Symposium, Darwin, Northern Territory, 19-20 June, 2003'. Northern Territory Geological Survey, Special Publication 1.