Carnarvon Petroleum Ltd (ASX:CVN) has ended the June quarter and will consequently enter the September quarter with a cash balance of $53 million.
During the June quarter, Carnarvon and its joint venture partner advanced multiple work streams in the Phoenix project located offshore from Western Australia.
Of particular note was the work in preparing for drilling the Phoenix South-3 and Dorado-1 wells, development planning for the Roc field and prospect mapping over the greater Phoenix area, using the partnership’s extensive seismic database.
The Phoenix South-3 well is expected to commence in early 2018 with the Phoenix South-2 insurance claim expected to fund most of the cost.
The operator, Quadrant Energy, is in the final stages of evaluating tenders for a semisubmersible rig with a contract expected to be signed shortly.
Project portfolio
Carnarvon holds 12 permits across 5 projects all based off-shore from northern Western Australia.
Details of the five projects includes:
- Phoenix: 4 permits with 20% interest in 2 and 30% interest in 2, operated by Quadrant Energy;
- Labyrinth: 1 permit with 100% interest;
- Buffalo: 1 permit with 100% interest;
- Maracas: 1 permit with 100% interest;
- Outtrim: 1 permit with 28.5% interest, operated by Quadrant Energy; and
- Cerberus: 4 permits with 100% interest.
Phoenix Project
The Phoenix South-3 well, a redrill of the Phoenix South-2 well, is being designed to test the Caley interval.
The structure is estimated to contain a gross mean recoverable prospective resource of 489 billion cubic feet of gas and 57 million barrels of associated condensate.
The Caley interval is also the primary target for the Dorado-1 well which Carnarvon is expecting to commence in mid-2018.
Development work around the discovered gas at Roc was progressed and the joint venture has commenced pre-FEED (Front End Engineering and Design) work aimed at determining the most robust concept for developing both the known hydrocarbons and potential future discoveries.
Labyrinth Project
Carnarvon has completed its interpretation of the newly reprocessed 2D seismic data and has identified a number of significant prospects.
In particular, the Labyrinth and Mouse prospects which are estimated to contain circa 400 million barrels of recoverable oil each at the Pmean confidence level.
Additionally, Carnarvon has identified numerous other high-graded prospects and leads estimated to contain over 1.5 billion barrels of recoverable prospective resource.
Buffalo Project
More data at Buffalo has been collected and processed which has considerably improved the data quality, allowing clearer analysis of key intervals in and around the Buffalo oil field.
As a result, Carnarvon has identified a potentially significant undrilled and unproduced area to the east of the original Buffalo development which was not previously identified.
In addition, Carnarvon joined Northern Oil & Gas Pty Limited (NOGA) on a collaborative data sharing project.
NOGA are the operator of production in the Laminaria oil field less than 10 kilometres from the Buffalo oil field.
The collaboration is aiming to better understand the area and to de-risk potential development opportunities, including the option to bring the Buffalo field back into production.