Carnarvon says the recently identified Belfon Upper Permian and Honeybadger Early Triassic prospects are estimated to contain "significant" volumes of recoverable oil.

While the company has declined to put any volumetrics around the North West Shelf targets at this stage it says they are in easy range of a jack-up rig, in 25-30 meters water depth, just 100 kilometres from the major port of Dampier, the centre of logistics support for oil and gas operations on the Northern Carnarvon Basin.

With reservoir depths between 1000m and 3000m subsea, the time required to drill down to total depth to test these targets estimated to be between 10 to 15 days.

If a jack-up can be secured, which can be an issue on the North West Shelf, it says the wells can be drilled for as little as $US10 million ($A13 million) each.

The Honeybadger prospect is defined as a middle slope turbidite channel complex, expected to be filled with high net-to-gross sands.

Importantly there is a stratigraphic and a structural element to the prospect, with a high chance of stacked pay.

The Belfon prospect is defined as a tilted fault block structure, with Permian Kennedy reservoir sealed by the regional overlying Locker shale.

Five Jurassic prospects also exist at reservoir depths between 1000-1500m and there are a further set of Cretaceous shallow oil prospects at just 500m depth that could be large in the context of North West Shelf oil prospects and are the focus of the current stage of geoscience studies, Carnarvon managing director Aidrian Cook explained.

Given EP490, EP491 and TP/27 are close to some of the country's largest and most prolific oil and gas fields the explorer is bullish on their potential.

The 600m deep Wandoo field had an estimated 250 million barrels of oil-in-place and is just north of Cerebus, while the 125MMbbl OIP Stag field is also in an adjacent area.

To the west of the Cerberus blocks, the Barrow Island oil field has produced over 300MMbbl since its discovery in 1964, while the Harriet oil and gas fields on Cerebus' western flank have produced more than 75MMbbl of oil and almost 400 billion cubic feet of gas.

"The Cerberus blocks are in an iconic hydrocarbon region and have the potential to host a number of similar sized oil fields as in the neighbouring blocks," Cook said.

Carnarvon has until May 2017 to commit to two contingent wells.

It expects to exceed that comfortably given it has effectively completed the first three-year work program already.

Cook said Carnarvon was already looking to obtaining the necessary drilling approvals.