In a statement this morning, the US energy major said a “significant portion” of this drilling was targeting the Harriet Joint Venture, where it is operator with a 68.5% stake.

Over the past couple of months, the company has brought three new HJV wells into production.

Both the Doric-2 and Lee-3 natural gas wells, located in the TL/1 permit, were completed in early January via the Varanus Island hub.

Production from Doric-2 is currently about 65 million cubic feet per day (MMcfd) of gas from the Flag sandstone, while Lee-3 is producing about 50MMcfd from the North Rankin, Brigadier and Mungaroo formations.

Apache said output from the two wells would replace volumes from other HJV gas wells flowing into existing marketing contracts.

Also recently completed from the Flagstone formation, is HJV’s West Cycad-2 well located in TL/9 permit.

This time an oil production well, West Cycad-1 was drilled as a sidetrack from Apache’s Victoria platform to produce a 32-foot oil column discovered more than 6km away from the nearest infrastructure.

Completed earlier this month, the well is producing at the rate of 6000 barrels of oil per day (bopd).

Apache said the Varanus Island hub was now a major Western Australia production centre that was currently handling 18,500bopd day and 310MMcfd of natural gas output.

In addition, the Varanus Island hub processes about 310MMcf of daily natural gas production – comprising about 40% of the gas sold into Western Australia’s domestic market.

Apache said it was also planning to drill an additional well, with multiple horizontal laterals, in the Bambra field, in TL/1 permit.

The extended-reach Bambra-7 well, which began producing natural gas in late 2005, recently started producing oil after a larger than anticipated gas cap was dissipated.

Bambra-7 is currently is producing 10MMcfd of gas and 3170bopd. It has produced 17 billion cubic feet of gas to date.

The remaining HJV stakeholders are Kufpec, with 19.2771%, and Tap Oil with 12.2229%.