The company says the well, located 200 km north northeast of Moomba in South Australia, is expected to take 18 days to drill and evaluate and will target five zones of potential production in the Namur, Birkhead, Hutton, Poolowanna and Tinchoo

formations.

Should a reservoir be discovered in the Namur, then the fault closed structure has a recoverable oil reserve range of between 5 to 42 million barrels, with a mean of 20 million barrels, Cooper said The four way dip closed structure has a recoverable reserve range between 1 to 4.6 million barrels with a mean of 2.5 million barrels.

Combining the two models results in an overall undiscovered recoverable reserve range of between 1 to 11.3 million barrels with a mean of 5.2 million barrels.

Cooper Energy CEO, Mike Scott said the company’s exploration portfolio always had room for a few high risk-high reward wells like Kitson.

“With the possibility of discovering up to 42 million recoverable barrels in a single reservoir plus the enormous upside of discovering multiple reservoir zones this undoubtedly has to be classed as a company making target,” Scott said.

“Should we have a discovery at Kitson there is an even larger target in PEL88 – the Lancier prospect. Lancier lies 15 km to the west of Kitson and Cooper would intend following this up as soon as feasibly possible following a success on Kitson.”

Recent successes at nearby fields had raised the profile of Kitson and Lancier and they were now viewed as viable targets, according to Scott.

The joint venture participants in the well are Cooper Energy Limited (30%), Sundance Energy Australia Limited (45%), Enterprise Energy NL (10%), Victoria Petroleum NL (10%) and Liberty Petroleum (Inc.) (5%).