SANTOS has said this morning the Corvus-2 appraisal well offshore Western Australia in the Carnarvon Basin has discovered a significant gas resource, intersecting a gross interval of 638 metres, making it one of the largest ever columns ever discovered across the North West Shelf.

It was drilled to almost 4000 metres in water depths of 63m.  

Wireline logging has confirmed 245m of net hydrocarbon pay across the target reservoirs in the North Rankin and Mungaroo formations, between 3,360-3,998m.  

"Corvus-2 has delivered a fantastic result and has opened up a number of additional exploration opportunities in the region," managing director Kevin Gallagher said.  

"It is particularly exciting to have realised a higher liquids content and significantly bigger resource volume than we expected." 

The well also encountered higher permeability zones than in Corvus-1 from initial pressure sampling which indicates a "significantly higher" condensate to gas ratio of some 10 barrels per million cubic feet, and CO2 content of 7%.  

It is three kilometres southwest of Corvus-1, drilled almost 20 years ago, 28km from the Reindeer platform that sends gas to the Devil Creek domestic gas plant in Karratha, and 62km from the Varanus Island tie in point, all of which Santos owns outright since its takeover of Quadrant Energy last year.  

Gallagher suggested Corvus-2 could be tied back to either facility and could increase their utilisation and provide backfill and extend the plateau "well into the 2030s".  

The Noble Tom Prosser drilled the well, which will be plugged and abandoned once logging operations are complete. 

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Source: Energy News Bulletin