The joint venture’s Australian participants – Victoria petroleum, Adelaide Energy and Fall River Resources – said swabbing operations had recovered oil and water from four zones in the Upper Cretaceous section of the well between 5400-5700 feet.

Mountain Petroleum now plans to install a pump to produce oil from the Codell Formation.

An estimated 25 barrels of oil and some associated gas flowed into the well from that formation over the 12-hour swabbing period.

The joint venture also plans to drill another well in the West Florence acreage to advance the project’s development.

The West Florence project originally covered a leasehold of 12,000 acres. The project participants were recently offered the rights to acquire additional working interest in an additional 13,000 acres of leasehold adjacent to the project.

West Florence-1 is the first well to be drilling in the West Florence Oil and Gas Project in the Denver Basin’s Florence Sub-basin. The leasehold is about 160km south of Denver, Colorado.

The project area is west of the Florence Oil Field which produced about 15 million barrels of oil from fractured shales of the Pierre Formation up to the 1940s.

According to Adelaide Energy, the Pierre in West Florence-1 remains untested but oil was encountered while drilling.

“This play will be developed and tested in a new well to be drilled later in the year,” the company said.

The prospective resource for the West Florence play as estimated by Mountain Petroleum ranges between 100-200 billion cubic feet of recoverable gas in the sands of the Muddy ‘J’ and Dakota Formation, and up to 15 million barrels of oil cumulatively in the Pierre, Niobrara and Codell Formations, if oil or gas is present.

Victoria Petroleum managing director John Kopcheff said the first-up success with West Florence-1 augured well for the interpreted presence of a large oil and gas development opportunity over the project’s large acreage position.

“We envisage a scenario based on adjacent historical production of numerous modest rate producing oil wells with the potential to providing cumulative significant oil production,” Kopcheff said.

“[But] further testing and drilling success is required to establish this scenario.”

The participants in the drilling of West Florence-1 and the West Florence Oil and Gas Project through their wholly owned subsidiaries are: Mountain Petroleum Corporation (operator and 25%), Victoria Petroleum (25%), Fall River Resources (15%), Adelaide Energy (15%), North American Oil Gas Energy (5%) and various private US interests (15%).