Lakes Oil recently placed 110 million ordinary shares at 2.1 cents each in order to fund the aggressive Victorian drilling campaign.

The funds raised will be used for Wombat-1, followed by Trifon-2 both in PEP 157, onshore Gippsland, with the proposed drilling of Barwon-1 in PEP 163 onshore Otway Basin, also in Victoria.

Wombat-1 is designed to test Latrobe Group sands, and the underlying Golden Beach Formation and Strzelecki Formation sands.

The Merriman-1 well, drilled by Arco in the 1960's, was drilled downdip at the edge of the structure and encountered good reservoir quality sands in the Golden Beach Formation and Latrobe Group.

Minor gas shows were encountered in the Tertiary section and Gas has flowed from tight Strzelecki Formation sands in wells immediately north of Wombat-1, and there is some evidence that Strzelecki Formation reservoir quality may improve to the south in the Seaspray area.

The Wombat Block is located in PEP 157 in which Lakes Oil has retained a 92.5% interest, subject to a 5% overriding royalty held by Roma Petroleum.