Speaking on Boardroomradio.com, Johnson said the Corella-E6 in PEL 16 had encountered strong gas shows in an 11m-thick sandstone zone during coring operations.

The company said the zone of interest comprised fractured, gas-charged sandstone, which exhibited characteristics of a conventional gas reservoir. These characteristics included significant over-pressuring and strong gas kicks during drilling.

Johnson said Metgasco was “very excited” by that occurrence.

“A conventional discovery would be beneficial in the sense that it gives us slightly greater degrees of flexibility in the mechanism of timing of gas delivery,” he said.

“And this has occurred in an area that we weren’t expecting, [which] I think demonstrates the fact that the Clarence-Moreton Basin has very significant potential and we’re really just scratching at the surface.”

Metgasco plans to undertake a drill stem test of the well “sometime in the short term”, Johnson said.

He said the company was unable undertake a DST last week due to safety reasons.

“The core drilling equipment we’re using has non-API rated casing and if we were to induce a flow-out of the well, we did not have equipment to be able to kill it as required after we’d completed our drill stem test,” he said.

“So we’ve left that hole in a state where we can come back with some better equipment to be able to undertake some drill stem tests and to determine flow rates in a safer and also more accurate manner.”

Interests in the PEL 16 joint venture are Metgasco (operator - 85%) and Queensland power supplier CS Energy (15%).

The Corella program, comprising 10 wells, is aimed at proving up 540 petajoules of proved and probable gas reserves.