The Queensland government announced last week that Senex was the successful tenderer for a Tier 1 CSG permit which CEO Ian Davies told analysts would materially expand the company's emerging gas business and develop a major new cash flow stream.

 

Senex has traditionally been a Cooper Basin-centred company and the Western Surat gas project was its first real foray into east coast gas, and that work is progressing.

 

Chief operating officer Darren Greer told Energy News that the new 58sq.km acreage award, named Atlas yesterday by its staff, gives the junior critical mass and a Queensland portfolio it hasn't previously had.

 

Senex said yesterday that the name Atlas means strength, integrity and resilience. 

 

"Senex's Project Atlas symbolises stronger domestic energy security for Australian businesses and households, delivered with integrity and resilience, and creating growth and opportunities for Senex and its stakeholders," the junior said.

 

Yet Greer received lots of questions at Good Oil in Perth yesterday about whether work on the new project means delays in the Western Surat project, to which his answer was "certainly not, we expect to run them both in parallel".

 

"We have the capability to do efficient and low-cost operations so the drilling completion connection for the Western Surat is being executed, and we expect to take that capability directly across to the new Atlas project," he told Energy News this morning.

 

"It's effectively 70km east of where we're currently operating. The main difference is it's Tier 1 acreage, and we expect it to be a lot more productive and profitable.

 

"The Western Surat work currently only involves one drilling rig and flowline crews to do the first surface infrastructure. So by any stretch of the imagination it's not a huge scale CSG operation.

 

"Developing another block in parallel isn't an enormous step up, and we have effectively the in-house capability to run both of them."

 

The drilling contractor is Schlumberger, with which Senex has a turnkey deal for drilling and completions; while local Roma workover rig supplier Wild Desert has also been engaged along with a range of others like Wasco for the pipelines and Flower's Earthmoving.

 

"We have a very strong local content push we call the Roma Postcode," Greer said.

 

"Wherever the capability exists in Roma we use it."