The state-owned company's vice-president of exploration, Pal Haremo, provided an update on operations in the Central Australian onshore permit at the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Conference yesterday.

"I'm very proud to say that we spudded our first well last week on April 1," Haremo said.

"We are at 900m now, so we have set the surface casing at 500m and are drilling now towards the coring target."

Haremo said that Statoil had investigated numerous opportunities across Australia before settling on the South Georgina, where it intended to focus exclusively on oil, but that this was no guarantee of the company having success in the region straight away.

"We looked at many opportunities all over Australia - these are frontier opportunities, so the confidence is really low by definition," Haremo said.

"So we have a few seismic lines, some old wells… this is a situation where it's very high risk.

"We talk often in such regions about less than 5% probability. That means if you expect to make a big discovery you have to drill 20 basins or more, so it's a wild shot and it's not easy to distinguish the best basin from all the other basins.

"Our plan is not to just have one try but is to define more opportunities, and then at the end make one big discovery."

This is a strategy that has driven Statoil to discover 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent on average per year around the world over the last three years, according to Haremo.

"We are being very aggressive on drilling, we have been drilling between 50 and 60 exploration wells globally the last three years, each year," he said.

"So we have really had some fantastic development in Statoil the last three years, we have been consistently performing well."

Haremo put the company's global investment in exploration over the past three years at $US3.5 billion ($A3.73 billion), with about $1.8 billion spent on drilling exploration wells.

The South Georgina work program so far involves five planned vertical wells with a combined total cost of $20-50 million.

In terms of infrastructure, the plan for how to move oil if a discovery is made is still up in the air, with the region currently devoid of any existing options.

Haremo confirmed that regardless of the South Georgina result, Statoil was in Australia to stay, saying that the company fully intended to participate in coming leasing rounds.

"For a company like us, we are not going into a completely new region just to make one small try [at a discovery]. We are trying to build a portfolio," he said.