Red Sky is a privately held Sydney-based exploration company backed by Canadian investors. It holds the exclusive Australian licence for the proprietary Sky Hunter airborne geochemical microseep survey technology.
The company currently has farm-in agreements with Great Artesian Oil & Gas and Stuart Petroleum.
The Sky Hunter technology is designed to map hydrocarbon microseeps associated with oil and gas reservoirs by recording airborne geochemical data sets on low level flight lines.
According to Empire, this technology has been used in North America over the last eight years to deliver oil and gas discoveries. Sky Hunter uses three data channels to measure total hydrocarbons, propane plus and pentane plus.
Red Sky claims that the combined mapping often results in the ability to distinguish between oil and gas-prone targets and it expects that the technology will be equally successful in Australia.
The EP 444 permit covers 5370 square kilometres along the onshore part of the Peedamullah Shelf in Western Australia’s Carnarvon Basin.
The main reservoir objective is the Early Cretaceous Birdrong Sandstone. Vertical seal is provided by the regional marine shales of the Muderong Shale. This shale is the regional seal for the vast majority of the petroleum deposits in the Carnarvon Basin.
Source is provided by the prolific Jurassic source rocks in the Barrow Sub-basin and entrapment relies on migration from this basin. Evidence of migration is provided by the presence of a palaeo oil leg in the Tubridgi gas field, residual oil in the Robe River and Mardie wells and good oil shows in Amber, Picul-1, Sapphire-2 and Topaz-1, according to Empire. In addition, globules of live oil were observed while drilling the mineral hole OND-1.
Red Sky and Empire have targeted the Amber airborne geochemical survey over the most oil-prospective areas in the EP 444 permit where there are seismically defined structural leads and where there were good oil shows in the petroleum wells drilled by previous explorers. These areas are the Amber-Topaz Area and the Picul-Sapphire-Abdul’s Dam Area.
Red Sky is to record more than 2200 flight line kilometres at 1km spacing to cover about 2000sq.km in the northernmost prospective area of EP 444.
The survey is planned to begin before the end of this month and Red Sky has 90 days from completing the survey to interpret the results and exercise its option to drill one well.
