Offshore Basins Pre-competitive Studies
Last updated:7 June 2023
Oil and gas discoveries in Australia’s offshore basins have been concentrated on the North West Shelf (Northern Carnarvon, Browse and Bonaparte basins) and Bass Strait (Gippsland, Inboard Otway and Bass basins). While discoveries have been made in a few regions outside these areas (e.g. Perth Basin), a large proportion of Australia’s offshore basins remain exploration frontiers.
Geoscience Australia’s strategic objective of Building Australia’s Resource Wealth will be achieved through the development of a pipeline of future discoveries by industry. Our work in prospectivity assessments and provision of pre-competitive information de-risks frontier offshore basins to encourage further exploration.
In 2014 Geoscience Australia produced a comprehensive inventory of the geology, petroleum systems, exploration status and data coverage for 35 frontier basins, sub-basins and provinces (Totterdell et al., 2014). The results of each area assessed are summarised in Figure 1 as a matrix of a prospectivity qualifier versus a confidence rating. The confidence rating reflects the availability of data and level of knowledge for that area.
Prospectivity/Confidence Matrix for Australia's Offshore Frontier Basins. As at January 2022. * indicates conceptual frontier.
We continue this work by targeting those basins and provinces that may be further de-risked (i.e. improvement in confidence rating), and to better understand their prospectivity. Industry will be able to build on this work to generate the oil and gas discoveries of the future.
The role of pre-competitive geoscience (blue) in exploration (after Shell – Play Based Exploration).
Offshore Basins Pre-competitive Studies undertakes a range of geoscience activities (Figure 2) to further the knowledge of frontier offshore hydrocarbon systems including: seismic interpretation and palaeogeographic mapping; petroleum well studies and petrophysics; biostratigraphic and sequence stratigraphic correlation; potential field analysis; and petroleum systems modelling. Through the integration of these scientific methods we build an understanding of basin evolution and prospectivity.
References
- Totterdell J.M., Hall L., Hashimoto T., Owen K. and Bradshaw M.T., 2014. Petroleum geology inventory of Australia’s offshore frontier basins. Record 2014/09. Geoscience Australia, Canberra.
The current focus of our prospectivity assessments are the following: