“Companies like Hardman have prompted many investors to look for a serious home run,” First Australian Resources chairman Michael Evans said.

“Small companies can really only get that magnitude of growth with large international plays.”

FAR makes no bones about aspiring to follow in Hardman’s footsteps.

The Perth-based junior used to be best known for its low-risk, incremental projects in Louisiana in the United States. But in January 2006 it moved into deepwater acreage off Senegal on the north-west African margin, not far south of Hardman’s Mauritanian blocks, taking a 30% stake in three blocks held by US major Hunt Oil.

“We’re in the same basin where Hardman made their initial discovery,” Evans says.

“We are targeting prospects in deepwater turbidite sediments that could hold more than a hundred million barrels, and we expect to identify other, much bigger, targets in the 500 million barrel range.”

Hunt and FAR have now completed an extensive seismic survey.

“We expect to finish processing and mapping late in the fourth quarter and will be looking for a rig by the end of year,” Evans said.

On the other side of Africa, a handful of Australian companies are exploring offshore Kenya.

The highest profile Australian-linked joint venture in Kenya comprises Woodside Petroleum, Queensland-based junior Global, United Kingdom company Dana Petroleum and Spain’s Repsol.

Woodside is exiting this partnership as part of its move to divest African assets in order to concentrate on its liquefied natural gas business.

The JV’s Pomboo-1 offshore well, drilled in March, failed to find hydrocarbons and they have until July next year to decide whether to commit to further wells in their Kenyan acreage.

Just south of Woodside’s blocks are three permits held by Perth junior Pancontinental Petroleum plus partners Origin Energy (in two of these blocks) and Gippsland Offshore Petroleum (in the remaining block).

Pancon is not put off by the failure of Pomboo-1, saying the Woodside acreage lies on the seaward side of an ocean ridge while Pancon’s is on the landward side.

The source rocks on either side of the ridge differ, with the landward rocks being more conducive to petroleum generation, according to Pancon.

Origin has paid for seismic in Pancon’s L-8 and L-9 permits, while Gippsland Offshore recently completed a Falcon aerial geophysical survey of their onshore-offshore Lamu Basin block.

Overall, the total acreage contains several trap types along with multiple reservoir-seal pairs at various stratigraphic levels. Some traps are capable of holding up to a billion barrels of oil.

The company was initially attracted to offshore Kenya by what it saw as close parallels with the structural development of the North West Shelf off Western Australia during the pull-apart and break up of the Gondwana landmass in the Mesozoic (Triassic-Cretaceous) period.

In particular, there is evidence of strong deltaic systems with deposition of a variety of sediments necessary for the development of reservoir, source rocks and seal - including the bonus possibility of evaporate seals because of the presence of restricted marine shallow water areas in the formative periods.

The main deltaic shales off Kenya are judged to be a richer source rock than those off Western Australia.

East Africa has the added potential of these multi-sediment deltaic systems existing into the Tertiary period providing further drillable targets stratigraphically higher than the Mesozoic.

On the North West Shelf, post-Cretaceous age sediments are mostly calcareous and do not have the critical elements to be petroleum prospective.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the Indian Ocean, other Australian juniors are looking to exploit a rich oil and gas trend that runs along the northern coast of Borneo north-east into the Philippines.

While Borneo’s petroleum resources are famous, nearby Philippines acreage remains underexplored.

And while conventional wisdom has it that Asian elephants are smaller than their African relatives, Otto energy chief executive Alex Parks insists it ain’t necessarily so.

He points out the Shell-operated Malampaya reef structure, northeast of Otto’s deepwater Philippines acreage, holds up to 200 million barrels (200MMbbl) of oil and 3.5 trillion cubic feet of gas.

“But the Marantao structure in our SC 55 permit is interpreted to be at least five times larger than Malampaya,” Parks said.

Marantao is over 100 square kilometres in size and could hold up to 1.1 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 3.6 trillion cubic feet of gas.

SC 55 also contains a string of similar reefal and turbidite leads that have the combined potential to be as big as Marantao.

But this block is very much in deep water and Marantao itself lies in about 1900m of water.

Like Hardman before it, Otto is working up the data in preparation for wooing some majors as farm-in partners.

“It would take a major player to tackle that block properly,” Parks said.

“In November-December, we’ll start looking at farm-out options. We’re hoping to do a deal in January or February.”

Meanwhile, another Perth-based junior Nido Petroleum has acquired substantial stakes in 3 million hectares of the Philippines’ Palawan Basin, much of it in sparsely explored territory south and west of the main Palawan discoveries.

Recent seismic work for Nido has identified 100 leads to follow up. Many appear to be multi-target pinnacle reef and turbidite plays in deep water where there has been little previous exploration.

Prospects such as Santa Monica, Coron North and Talusi have analogues to discoveries in the Palawan’s shallow water blocks and they will be drilled during a program beginning in 2008.

Nido has previously said one prospect in its SC 54 block could hold as much as 450MMbbl of oil in place.

Who will be the next Hardman? See the September issue of Petroleum magazine, out next week