“Compared with North American basins, it’s been very lightly drilled,” he said.

“My view of the Queensland Cooper-Eromanga is that it’s just starting – it’s very much blue sky outside the Santos acreage – and even the South Australian Cooper still has plenty of untapped potential.

“Right now, Victoria Petroleum is drilling in a part of the Cooper that I think is awesome.”

VicPet and its partners are exploring PEL 104 on the western flank of the Cooper in South Australia and could be on the verge of opening up a new oil province, according to Prefontaine.

VicPet’s recent success at the Growler and Wirraway wildcats maintains the company’s 100% exploration success rate in PEL 104 and confirms its belief that it may have found a new Jurassic oil province that could have a significant impact on the company’s growth, according to managing director John Kopcheff.

“If oil is present, it has the potential for an in-place reserve of up to 100-plus million barrels within PEL 104 and our adjoining PEL 111 permit,” Kopcheff said.

Prefontaine is confident that VicPet will find more oil in the block.

“But I think the risk is whether they will find oil that flows at reasonable rates,” he said.

However, the prospects dearest to Prefontaine’s heart lie not in the South Australian Cooper, but across the state border in the Queensland portion of the Eromanga.

According to Prefontaine, the only part of the Eromanga that has received serious exploration is the acreage held by Santos and by the Santos-led Cooper Oil project venture.

The central Eromanga, in particular, has been overlooked and underexplored, he argued, and most of the exploration to date has been misdirected.

“The region’s petroleum system isn’t well understood,” Prefontaine said.

“Most of the wells were drilling on Tertiary-aged structures which were formed after primary oil migration and entrapment and never got charged with oil. We have to develop an understanding of the region’s geological history to figure out which features got charged and where the oil went to.”

Despite this, there have been many oil recoveries and oil shows in many of the wells drilled in the central Eromanga.

In the Jurassic period, this region was covered by extensive shallow lakes, rich in plant and animal life. Prefontaine believes that the sediments left by these bodies of water have very likely formed a rich petroleum play.

“In the central Eromanga, geological data indicates there is likely a Jurassic oil system with only a small number of wells having been drilled so far,” he said.

“The Queensland portion of the basin also has a Cretaceous system in the Murta, then classic Permian.”

But it’s the Jurassic that has captured Bow’s interest. The region’s Jurassic oil is light, sweet and lower in paraffin than its Permian-sourced crudes, which can be very waxy and have high pour points with some being like candle wax at room temperatures.

The area’s only significant discovery is the Inland oil field, found in 1994 by IOR Energy.

“We see the Inland oil field as a palaeo-trap with primary oil migration in the trap with some late re-structuring,” Prefontaine said. “There appear to be several analogies to Inland within our tenements.”

Prefontaine claims that the acreage held by his company has several high-risk prospects that could contain 50 million barrels or more of oil, but most were low-to-moderate risk targets in the 1–10MMbbl range.

Bow has built a dominant position in the central Eromanga and is now preparing a farm-out program after having spent many painstaking hours reprocessing data.

“Queensland is not a particularly good custodian of data,” Prefontaine said.

“We’ve been mining the seismic data for the central Eromanga. We’ve actually had to scan 3000–4000km of data, converting TIF [image] files into a digital format for use on our workstations.

“We’ve been doing that for almost a year and a half and have identified 83 prospects and leads in our areas. We are now high-grading the leads and prospects for farm-out and drilling programs.”

First published in a different form in the July issue of Petroleum magazine