The Hunt Energy Rig 2 has been contracted to drill the Megascolides-1 well with an option to drill two additional wells back to back once it completes work on the Lakes Oil Wombat-3 well at the end of September 2004.
Megascolides-1 will target Coal Bed Methane (CBM) in the early Cretaceous age Strzelecki Formation and a deeper conventional petroleum target at the Crayfish Group equivalent level which is prospective and productive in the Western Otway Basin. The Megascolides-1 prospect is a broad faulted anticlinal structure with potential for hydrocarbon trapping at a number of levels.
The prospect is expected to be gas charged with the CBM targets from 700 to 1100m with the conventional gas target at a depth of 1700m.
An audit of EL4537 has also identified a potentially commercial brown coal resource using ESSO field work data from the early 1980's that defined the resource with seismic and the drilling of 77 bores.
Independent evaluation by GHD has now determined a coal in-situ resource estimate around 340 million tones of measured, indicated and inferred resources.
