"Our focus is on proven petroleum areas within Queensland that have infrastructure and relatively low risk," Prefontaine said.
"We obtain equities in underexplored oil-prone areas and value-add by building up a quality prospect inventory and identifying bypassed oil pay zones."
Bow aims to farm-out oil prospects to divest risk, but has not farmed-out its low-cost, low-risk CSM acreage.
The company has attracted attention for an oil find earlier this month at its Santos-operated Cuisinier-1 oil wildcat and for positive coreholes at its Don Juan CSM project, but Bow also has extensive acreage in the central Eromanga Basin and the southwest Surat Basin where in both cases it is moving to farm-out areas where it has identified dozens of oil leads and prospects.
These farm-out programs could attract a lot of interest following the Cuisinier discovery.
In the Cooper-Eromanga, Bow and its partners may be on the verge of proving up a new oil trend, according to Prefontaine.
"Cuisinier was a good result, but Hudson will be the one that tells," Prefontaine said.
The proposed Hudson-1 well is to be drilled about 20km southwest of Cuisinier-1. At least six other oil prospects have been identified on trend and between the two wells.
Cuisinier lies in the company's ATP 752P permit (in southwest Queensland near the NSW and South Australian borders) where operator Santos and Canada's Avery Resources farmed-in to two blocks to join Bow and Victoria Petroleum.
After drilling Cuisinier in the Barta Block, Bow is now fully carried for up to six additional wells in that block plus 300 square kilometres of 3D seismic.
The nearby Wompi Block has 21 oil prospects adjacent to a new Santos oil pipeline to Moomba and wells with high initial flow rates. Santos is planning three new 3D seismic programs followed by several wells later this year and early in 2009. Bow will be fully carried on the first four exploration wells.
Prefontaine is bullish on this acreage, and says Bow is targeting 15 million barrels of reserves from the Barta project and 6MMbbl from the Wompi Block.
But the size of the ATP 752P project areas is dwarfed by the extent of Bow's holdings to the northeast in the central Eromanga where the company has the largest land position in the region and has identified 83 prospects and leads.
Prefontaine is convinced that 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 systems aren't well understood," he said.
Despite this, there have been significant 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, now mature for oil generation in the cental Eromanga, have very likely formed the source for a rich petroleum play.
"The generation and accumulation of this oil into sealed reservoirs forms an is interpreted to form a Jurassic oil system in," he said.
"The Queensland portion of the basin also has a Cretaceous system in the Murta as well as the more accepted Permian petroleum system."
But it's the Jurassic that has captured Bow's interest as the Jurassic-sourced oil should be light and sweet.
The area's only significant discovery is the Inland oil field, found in 1994 by IOR Energy. This field lies close to Bow blocks and Prefontaine says the Inland Structural Trend extends into company's central Eromanga acreage.
"There appear to be several analogies to Inland within our tenements," he told the conference.
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.
But further progress in this region will depend on the success of Bow's farm-out program.
If the central Eromanga is semi-frontier country, Bow's Surat Basin CSM acreage is low-risk and better understood.
Prefontaine was the exploration manager and executive director for Arrow Energy during its formative year and is regarded in the industry as an expert on Surat Basin CSM.
The company's Don Juan project area, held in partnership with Victoria Petroleum, lies immediately west of Sunshine Gas' successful Lacerta project, which contains between 500 billion and 1 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Prefontaine says Bow has interpreted that the Lacerta CSM fairway runs through the Don Juan area. Corehole results so far have been positive and four production wells have been drilled. The Taringa South-1 well flowed at 370,000 cubic feet per day.
Bow, as operator, is aiming to prove up to 200 petajoules of gas in this area by early next year. Production testing and core hole drilling as required for reserve certification will continue in the Don Juan area through 2008.
Bow also has one more core area - the southwest Surat - which contains a diverse portfolio of oil targets, according to Prefontaine.
Prefontaine says the southwest Surat is not well understood and he believes it offers excellent potential for multiple oil discoveries.
"Our regional and detailed geological work indicates the area has all of the necessary geological ingredients for commercial, high-flow potential oil accumulations," he said.
The company already has one oil producer at the Rookwood oil field and is working to get its Donga oil field up and running. The initial focus will be at its Stratton Area and Jawsone prospects.
Bow is finalizing a partial farm-out at Stratton, in which it will retain 42-45%, and has farmed-in to Jawsone, which lies in the Mosaic Oil-operated PL 15 permit, paying 50% on Jawsone to earn 25% in the permit. Seismic and wells are being planned in these permits.
Prefontaine says in the near term the company is targeting reserves of 2MMbbl at Jawsone and 6MMbbl at Stratton, but it believes that up to 30MMbbl could eventually be found in the Stratton Area.
