Authors / CoAuthors
Williamson, P. | Foster, C.
Abstract
Australia contains established oil and gas provinces (Fig. 1), is politically stable, and has a fiscal regime which encourages petroleum exploration and development. These combined with infrastructure all serve to attract and maintain petroleum exploration and production investment in the established oil and gas provinces. Over the last ten years Australia has maintained 65-85% self sufficiency in oil and better than 100% sufficiency in gas as a net gas exporter through LNG. The Australian government has a new program of data acquisition in poorly explored areas and the recently announced Spatial Information and Data Access Policy requires that basic data be made available at the marginal cost of transfer, or is free if delivered via the internet. In addition, to encourage exploration in its many under-explored regions, Australia has traditionally maintained better access to geoscience and petroleum exploration data than almost anywhere else in the world. Access to petroleum exploration information has been facilitated by legislation requiring data submission and availability, and by the provision of pre-competitive studies by government agencies. This is coupled with an aggressive, globally and yearly promoted, acreage release program. Australia remains significantly under-explored and for that reason has sought to improve the very high level of access to exploration and production data that includes seismic data, well information, and regional geological studies. Ease of access is designed to attract new explorers. Australia has less than eight thousand petroleum exploration wells onshore and offshore in an area of over twelve million square kilometres and, consequently, there is considerable opportunity for further exploration. Significant discoveries of oil and gas have occurred in Australia since the 1960?s and continue to the present day. Super giant oil and gas fields have been discovered both in the southeast and northwest of Australia. Globally, Australia ranks 27 as an oil producer and 18 as a gas producer. Although under-explored, already it is assessed as containing upwards of 2% of the world?s gas reserves and 1% of the world?s oil reserves. Recently, deeper water exploration (>1200m) has occurred in Australia adjacent to major gas and oil production in the Carnarvon Basin and to major discoveries in the adjacent Browse Basin on the Northwest Shelf. Significant deep-water oil discoveries at Laverda, Vincent and Enfield, of over 200 mmbls have been made in the Carnarvon Basin, and many tens of Tcf of gas have been discovered at Gorgon and deep water fields further to the west (Longley et al 2001).
Product Type
nonGeographicDataset
eCat Id
61038
Contact for the resource
Custodian
Point of contact
Cnr Jerrabomberra Ave and Hindmarsh Dr GPO Box 378
Canberra
ACT
2601
Australia
Keywords
-
- GA Publication
- Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC)
-
- Earth Sciences
-
- Published_Internal
Publication Date
2004-01-23T00:00:00
Creation Date
Security Constraints
Legal Constraints
Status
Purpose
Maintenance Information
unknown
Topic Category
geoscientificInformation
Series Information
Lineage
Unknown
Parent Information
Extents
Reference System
Spatial Resolution
Service Information
Associations
Downloads and Links
Source Information
Source data not available.