The company said on Thursday that as part of Australia’s 2012 gazettal round, it had been awarded WA-488-P, covering 4105 square kilometres in the Bonaparte basin and located below MEO’s wholly-owned permit WA-454-P.

MEO believes the new block contained the “substantial” Beehive prospect, which could be readily advanced to drillable prospect status by the reprocessing of seismic data and the integration of offset well data.

“The