Falcon Oil & Gas gets Beetaloo boost

Irish explorer Falcon Oil & Gas has said a fresh evaluation by RPS Energy has more than doubled the prospective natural gas resources at its Beetaloo basin licences onshore Australia.

Falcon Oil & Gas said that the new resource report had “considered the potential of the whole of the on-block basin”, and that it included data garnered from 2011’s Shenandoah 1 well.

The Dublin-based, Toronto-listed junior said that the independent evaluation raised the prospective gas potential by 153% from 64 trillion cubic feet of prospective recoverable resources to 162 trillion cubic feet.

The same study raised the oil potential at the licences from 18 billion barrels of oil to 21 billion barrels.

The explorer’s four Beetaloo exploration permits cover 7 million acres of the remote basin area of Australia’s Northern Territory that were last evaluated by Ryder Scott studies in 2009 and 2010.

The permits are wholly owned by Falcon Oil & Gas Australia, the explorer’s 73% subsidiary.

US independent Hess has been gathering new seismic data on three unconventional blocks within the acreage under a 2011 farm-in that could see it gain a 62.5% stake in the trio if it elects to drill five wells.

Meanwhile, a newly-made estimate of prospective recoverable resources at the explorer’s shallower Algyo Play at Mako Trough onshore Hungary pegged P50 potential of 568 billion cubic feet of gas in eight prospects.

Falcon Oil & Gas said it and partner NIS had identified three priority prospects that would be drilled in a three-well programme starting at the end of the quarter.

At the same time, RPS Energy reduced the deeper contingent resources it previously studied at Mako Trough to 35.27 trillion cubic feet of gas from 43.94 trillion cubic feet in proven and probable reserves.

The estimates also cut proven and probable oil volumes at the play from 97.8 million barrels to 76.71 million, when compared to reports by RPS Energy from March 2008.