On Friday Icon concluded a year's worth of negotiations with Beach, which had lost its zeal to chase the shale gas play after drilling seven wells in ATP 885P. 

 

Icon has moved to a 100% interest in the eastern half of the trough, and managing director Ray James told Energy News it was a significant opportunity for the junior, which could take advantage of the $150 million drilled to date for no cost.

 

Chevron pulled out in 2015 after head office decided to close down speculative investments around the globe rather than committing to a further $150 million for the second phase at a time when the global oil price was in freefall.

 

James told Energy News there were no "project killers" seen in the project to date, and he expected the company would be able to leverage off the work done, and progress assessment using a lower-cost small company structure. 

 

"While it wasn't as big as Chevron and Beach originally though a potential recoverable resource of 28 trillion cubic feet is still significant," James said.

 

Beach had wanted to park the project to focus on other, shorter-horizon projects, but Icon had invested considerable funds in maintaining its interest in ATP 885P and has been keen to see it advance.

 

"We wanted to pursue the gas we had found, and Beach offered not to stand in our way," James said.

 

Beach has now departed the permit, allowing Icon to take it over at no cost, beyond the usual well remediation costs.

 

As the work commitments have been met, Icon is under no external pressure to undertake work.

 

"The next stage is to raise capital," James said. 

 

"We have been negotiating that for couple of years, but until today we couldn't press the button because we couldn't tell anyone that we were the operator."

 

One of the issues with the Nappamerri Trough is that there are no liquids credits in the dry gas, the CO2 levels are high, and the subsurface environment is high-pressure and high temperature.

 

Despite those obstacles, James said it was nothing that could not be dealt with, and Chevron had already shown the way towards well engineering solutions.

 

"We have that in hand, and we know what to do with that, with Chevron's enormous help. That leads us to what we need to do next.

 

"We have some experimental work to do, and it is still an exploration project, but it doesn't need expenditure to fund seismic and further drilling.

 

"We are very excited by this. It is a real opportunity, we just don't know if we can get it out of the ground commercially, but there are several things that have not been tried yet."

 

The block comes with a 2C resource of 1.57 trillion cubic feet per day around the Hallifax-1 well, which flowed at 4.5 million cubic feet per day.

 

Initially Icon will look at the work it can fund itself, but it is looking at finding an off-take partner, and that means most, if not all the gas, is likely destined for export.

 

"Off-takers like that don't exist in Australia, but we will be interested in selling early gas into the east coast market, because that is crying out loud for gas, but we do need to get some money together, and we do have a contract in place in China that has been extended several times," James said.

 

He said Icon would be pursuing ATP 855P as a longer-term gas project and its 100% interest in ATP 594P where it has recently completed the Harrier 3D seismic, which could offer shorter term oil exploration rewards.

 

James said small companies were sitting on 65% of the east coast permits and considerable stranded gas potential, and he would not be surprised if there was some move in Queensland to provide further incentives to helping unlock the 2P reserves that are currently unable to get into pipelines.

 

Icon shares were 2.9 cents this morning, off almost 1c since Thursday.