Carnarvon Petroleum Limited (ASX:CVN) has received new data that shows increasingly clear definition around the producing reservoir in the Buffalo oil field.
The data further improves imaging at the Elang formation, which is the producing reservoir in the field off Western Australia’s northern coast.
A seismic image shows reservoir up-dip of the Buffalo-5 production well into an area Carnarvon expects will contain unproduced oil.
The reservoir has been reconciled with important well data within the oil field.
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This improvement in data quality increases Carnarvon’s confidence in the redevelopment of the field.
At this stage, the Carnarvon team believe the data set is sufficient to take the project forward to drilling and development.
Buffalo is in the Bonaparte Basin off Western Australia’s north coast.
Improved data has been made possible due to significant increases in computing power since the field was last in production in 2004.
Carnarvon has been working with seismic reprocessing firm DownUnder GeoSolutions to achieve these results.
The Buffalo project was secured by Carnarvon in 2016 with the objective of running modern seismic technologies to determine whether seismic velocity issues in the past could be solved.
Vast improvement in seismic data
The first iteration appeared to achieve this objective and a second reprocessing iteration was undertaken as an independent check of the initial reprocessing work.
All of the learnings from the first two reprocessing iterations were then incorporated into the third reprocessing iteration.
The result is a data set that is a vast improvement on the historic seismic data that was available when the field was last in production.
In addition to the work being undertaken around the Buffalo oil field, the Carnarvon team are also mapping the untapped exploration prospects within the permit.
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The company was recently awarded the AC/P63 permit within the Southern Vulcan Sub-basin, on Western Australia’s North West Shelf.
This 585 square kilometre permit, to be known as the Eagle Project, is in shallow water and contains multiple attractive leads.
It is in the same oil-producing basin that includes the Talbot, Jabiru, and Cassini/Challis oil fields.