Remote player: Beach Petroleum
Beach happy with Callawonga 'sweet spot'
Beach Petroleum is confident the area near its remote Callawonga project in South Australia marks the next chapter for oil and gas production in the Cooper-Eromanga basin.
"This area looks as it is. It is unexplored, it is remote and untouched," Beach's managing director Reg Nelson said.
Callawonga is the farthest west discovery in the Cooper-Eromanga basin.
"We have established there is a model of the oil migrating and moving to the west and getting trapped in these structures,” Nelson said.
“A sweet spot like Callawonga suggests that you are in a good area, and if you keep drilling around that area you should have more success."
Currently, Beach has to truck oil from the Callawonga field until a pipeline linked to established infrastructure can be constructed.
This lack of infrastructure has restricted output to about 1500 barrels of oil per day.
Nelson said the pipeline should be completed within two months and would allow the company to boost output from Callawonga to about 5000 barrels a day.
The Callawonga field holds about 5 million to 6 million barrels of oil and Nelson is confident more fields of similar size will be discovered in the area.
"They are not going to be huge, they are going to be about this size [Callawonga]," Nelson said.
"It is a bit like a detective story: follow one lead, follow another and eventually you hit a sweet spot like this."