The junior's story is all about US conventionals right now, but that shifted back to the Beetaloo and McArthur basins briefly after the NT frac inquiry's draft final report came up trumps for industry this week.

 

The report said risks could be mitigated or even in some cases eliminated, but said further environmental studies would be needed.

 

Empire is sitting on 2.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent in P50 resources across 14.6 million acres across those basins, of which the McArthur shale targets are considered analogous to the US' famed Marcellus and Utica shales, while the Velkerri shales in the Beetaloo are "target ready".

 

Executive chairman Bruce McLeod told Energy News the NT inquiry's draft final report was "very good news if you're involved in the game in the Northern Territory", but was all too aware that ultimately it was a political decision, not a scientific one, and debunked RBC Capital Markets' suggestion the ban could be lifted for the Beetaloo only.

 

The report made clear that the Beetaloo was the only basin among several that could be developed inside the next decade, particularly given Origin Energy's Amungee NW-1H well delineated a gross contingent resource of 6.6 trillion cubic feet (2C) in February.

 

While McLeod said the inquiry's draft final report was "very fair and balanced", and what would be expected from an inquiry that looked at all the facts, but the giveaway line was that it's a "political decision", which inquiry chair Justice Rachel Pepper said.

 

Empire had ex-Chesapeake Energy experts in American Energy Partners funding and advising on drilling shale wells in the NT until AEP's owner Aubrey McClendon was killed in a car accident, so his wound up and the farm-out was terminated earlier this year.

 

Since the farm-out was terminated, Empire has been working on things in the background but McLeod said "t's pretty hard when you've got a moratorium in place; there's not too many people too interested".

 

With Empire's US unconventionals also blocked by New York State, he also doesn't expect the NT to make a decision until mid-2018, with the final report delayed after a Coffey contractor was caught encouraging traditional owners to support the industry.

 

"Until we get a political decision, I just think it's too hard for people to get too excited. They're waiting on a major political decision, which is really a yes or no," McLeod said.

 

RBC Capital Markets suggested the government could just lift the ban for the Beetaloo, which the inquiry said was the only realistic developable prospect inside the next decade, but McLeod says that's rubbish.

 

 

His former AEP partners who were ex-Chesapeake who had drilled thousands of wells in the US had mapped out with Empire the North McArthur Sub-basin, where he believes they drilled more wells in a year than anyone has in the Beetaloo in five years.

 

 It depends on the parties./ if you have an aggressive American company that knows what they're doing, they'll go out and drill 10 wells in a year. 

 

Even the Amungee well only flowed about 1.1MMcfpd for almost two months from the Velkerri B Shale, which perhaps should have been flowed at 20MMcfpd to be a real hope, he suggested - but could still be defined as a discovery well, it just needs to be defined and be made to work.

 

The problem, he says, is Australia's shortage of shale expertise, right across subsurface, drilling, completions, though not so much processing.

 

If the fraccing inquiry comes out positively and people can start moving ahead on a planned basis over the next 3-4 years, I th8ink tremendous things can happen, but we need the expertise.

 

While Empire's partner would not necessarily need to be a US entity, it would need to be a structure that brought in American expertise, he said.