The joint venture completed its six-well development campaign in the field last month with the Bauer-18 well which was cased and suspended as a future oil producer.

The campaign was part of a broader full-field development plan aimed at supporting past record levels of production from the Namur sandstone reservoir.

Bauer-18 intersected the target top Namur sandstone 7m high to prognosis with 6.6m of additional net oil pay. An additional 4.2m oil-bearing interval of overlying McKinlay member was also encountered.

The six recently drilled Bauer wells are expected to be online in the third quarter of this year. The Bauer field is in what was formerly PEL 91, but is now two petroleum retention licences.

The Hanson-2 well was also drilled in the area during December, and was initially interpreted to have 1.5m of net oil pay in the McKinlay and 3m in the Namur.

Elsewhere in the Western Flank of the Cooper Basin during the last month of 2014, Drillsearch and Senex drilled a dry hole in their Sheerkhan-1 well.

A similar result was had in the company's wet gas fairway JV with Beach, where the Antechamber-1 and Danville-1 wells came up empty.

Drillsearch also found its Aquamarine-1 well with Santos to be sub-commercial despite elevated gas shows, but had more luck with the Yarowinnie South well which turned up a best estimate of 15m net gas pay.

In the Northern Cooper wet gas area, the company completed production testing on its Vanessa-1 well, flowing 5 million standard cubic feet of gas per day.

The highlight of Drillsearch's December was perhaps the recertification of its Flax production facility in the basin and the re-boot of its Flax-3 well after the facility was suspended by its former owner two years previous.

Beach finished off its central field program with Santos and Origin Energy during the period, completing 13 months of drilling on 32 wells from six pads.

The final pad of three wells was deferred to assess learnings from the adjacent pads.