Science capabilities unlock Australia's oil and gas potential

Abstract

Australia is on the way to become the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), with first shipments leaving the newly established export terminal on the east coast and four more development projects on the North West Shelf to be completed by 2017. Despite Australia being a key supplier of natural gas to the ever expanding energy markets in the Asia-Pacific region, the declining oil production is of concern. In this context, the Australian government actively supports the acquisition of precompetitive data that are used to enhance the understanding of hydrocarbon prospectivity in underexplored regions. Modern geophysical techniques, such as potential-field data interpretation, that allow the evaluation of basin configurations at regional scale are tools of ever increasing importance. Organic geochemistry has been applied to group the existing hydrocarbon accumulations according to oil families and tie those to the related source-rock intervals. Such work identifies oil and gas accumulations for which the source remains unknown, providing the impetus for further data acquisition. Many of Australia's sedimentary basins still are vastly underexplored, offering plenty of opportunities to make additional discoveries, as demonstrated by recent successes.