Zen10

Up to 233 billion barrels, or 12% of the world's total oil supply, could be in the Arckaringa Basin in South Australia. Some say this could go to 400 billion and be the largest oil discovery in 50 years and would put more oil in Australia than all of Iraq, Iran, Canada and Venezuela put together, and nearly as much as Saudi Arabia. It's unconventional oil, but so is most of the oil found now.

A load of crap, or geopolitical game-changer?


http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil...uperstate.html

steve`o

i wonder how long before America invades, purely on humanitarian reasons of course

Hino

They already have....

Pine Gap near Alice Springs is already American Territory and American forces in Darwin and other 'occupied' parts of Australia, already have "diplomatic immunity" for any crime they might commit.

Advance Australia fair

chris955

Estimates of the reserves range from 3.5 billion to 233 billion barrels, its a bit like saying buy this new car it can do something in the region of 5 or 1000 miles per gallon. They are saying the same thing here, apparently up to 1,300 TRILLION cubic feet of gas in the north. Its all wild speculation.

GarryP

It's Linc Energy, the story from about 6 months ago, recycled for another round of pump'n'dump.

Points:

1. Nobody is quite sure what it is. The reports they reference are an exercise in obscuration and weasel words - but it does mention the key word 'kerogen' once or twice (eg "are rich in oil and gas-prone kerogen"). That's kind of a tell-tale, and a death-knell. For those who don't know, kerogen is NOT oil, it's a precursor (kind of like as peat is to coal) that needs to be cooked under pressure to create oil. It's all over the place and NOBODY has a workable way to turn it into real oil - big oil companies like Shell have been trying for decades. One of the major problems, besides you have to put a metric sh*t load of energy IN to convert it, is that the spoil produced afterwards is bigger than what you dig out (eg it don't fit back into the hole).
   
   In other words, if it's kerogen, as seems likely, it's worthless.
2. If it were tight oil (aka shale oil) then it still doesn't mean it's viable. You need a lot of factors to align to make a play where it is viable to drill the thousands of wells necessary to recover it via fracking (there's that dreaded word). In particular you need the structure to be criss crossed by fault lines, so that your fracking can intersect these and recover oil from a much large volume. Even then, you are looking at 10% recovery. If it's not, you'd be looking at a cost per barrel that means it would forever stay in the ground.
3. Oil production at reasonable costs is all about finding concentrations of oil - not oil bearing rocks. If you don't have a way of it getting concentrated somehow, you generally don't have a play. Drilling just one well costs millions, and you have to make that back and more before you can even think about it.

Best guess is that the volumes they are talking about is mainly kerogen, with possibly a few areas where it might have been cooked enough to turn it into a bit of oil - tight shale oil. They won't know if they can actually either find this oil, or produce it, till they drill some wells. They are pushing the story, and the numbers, to try to entice some shmuck into funding it - but frankly, after 6 months, if they don't already have investors lined up and clamouring then they probably don't have anything tasty.

Zen10

Interesting, thanks.

Amazulu

We're going to be a major world player in O&G anyway thanks to all the gas projects in Northern WA and Curtis Island - and will become more so when we exploit the unconventional assets in the Canning Basin. Whether the area you talk about can be exploited remains to be seen. Some oil will be recoverable but a lot of it may not be

I'm studying oil and gas markets as part of my MBA at the moment. I'll ask my lecturer on Wednesday about this SA area - he's a guru on this kind of thing

Just had a quick read of your link and wanted to add that the US government's EIA is a hugely reliable source of information - we use it a lot at uni

Zen10

I'd be interested to know his opinion. My eye just caught the bit at the end about how Adelaide needs to upgrade its airport to deal with the increase corporate traffic - well, it's doing just that, so maybe they know something we don't.

renth

+1 I never trusted Linc since I saw their pump and dump adverts on Sky Business News, their CEO bloke on the ads is just like that Aussie Home Loans dude, very shady!

Where are they going to get all the water to frack the rock anyway? assuming that there's even frackable reserves there in the first place?

Mike at Taree

Whatever happened to geothermal energy? Apparently there's enough hot rocks in SA to supply as much as the Snowy Mountains schemes, and long distance DC transmission to markets is a mature tech. There are even plans to export Geo-T electricity from Iceland to Europe via undersea DC cables.

If the Philippines can produce a fair proportion of their power from Geo-T what's wrong with us? As usual, Australia the great country with a wonderful future - behind it.

Swerv-o

This is sadly true - lack of investment in alternative technologies has always blighted Australia - Where are the solar furnaces? The geothermal and tidal systems? The fields of solar cells collecting boundless energy from the sun? So far we have managed to put together some experimental systems as a proof of concept, and that's about it.

The real shame is that investing in these technologies brings in more than just energy - it also generates an associated knowledge industry, and makes our experiences valuable to other countries. How the hell can we be behind the Germans in terms of solar energy FFS? Because the Germans have invested and developed their economies to include new ideas - some may not work out, but even then lessons are learned.

I often think that the income from the resources boom has been squandered and wasted by successive governments - I think this goes beyond party politics - and has left us with a very poorly diversified economy that seems to sit on a knife edge of recession or overcapacity.


S

Mike at Taree

Agree. Apart from a few token show wind farms and of course the Snowy Mountain scheme that was constructed in an era when Australia had a vision and wasn't reduced to 30 second video grabs, the only renewable technology seems to be roof panels fitted by owner occupiers who are then paid by renters and the poor through their increased electricity bills.

Amazulu

Nuclear is the way to go

8 plants should do it - big f**k-off baseload stations:
2 NSW
2 VIC
2 QLD
1 SA
1 WA

We have the uranium - mine it, process it, use it

Some gas, solar, wind, wave, GT for the rest

Energy security done and dusted for the next 50 years

Done and dusted

GarryP

The point is everyone has time horizons below 5 years.

The politicians aren't going to do something that isn't going to show results before the next election. CEOs need to show shareholder returns and lower level managers again need to be moving up within a shorter timeframe, so wouldn't see the benefit of pushing long timeline activities. Banks and VC have their discounted cashflow that mean beyond 5 years a programme needs to be spectacular to find investment.

It's a major problem with nuclear. Build times are high, risk profile is high, liabilities are high, and the return is heavily coupled to base load wholescale costs. Frankly, even if they got fusion working tomorrow, its far from certain anyone would actually build it.

As far as alternative energy is concerned, that's where pilot programmes come in. You need to get it to a turnkey solution where its derisked sufficiently that you can be certain to build and have generating inside 2 year at an attractive rate. Its why windfarms have found funding - the build time is known (its quite quick), the return is known, the green subsidies are certain. Commercial solar isn't turnkey enough yet.

Mike at Taree

Russia, India and China are going to start building "turn key" fast nuclear reactor plants for export, they'll whack one together on site for you for a couple of billion.

Fast nuclear reactors are safe compared to traditional models, if there's an emergency they automatically shut down as opposed to the current water cooled reactors that blow their tops (FNRs are cooled by liquid metals such as lead, not water). And they produce a minute amount of waste, as the waste produced by the primary reaction is then further burned with fast moving neutrons.

Not science fiction, they are building some right now.

Edit: spelink