Carnarvon announces assessment of Dorado resources

Carnarvon’s Managing Director and CEO, Adrian Cook said, “The 171 million barrels of oil discovered in Dorado is one of the largest oil resources ever found on the North West Shelf. Oil fields of this significant scale are not often found, with the last large field discovery on the North West Shelf being around 30 years ago. It is common for additional resources to be discovered in the surrounding area after a large discovery. In this regard, we expect to provide the market with further details on prospects identified by the play concept now proven at Dorado, that we believe have the potential to also contain oil resources.”

“The gas and condensate discovered in the Phoenix Project is also is a significant and valuable resource that is in addition to the discovered oil. Dorado discovered 552 billion cu ft. of gas and 16 million barrels of condensate on a 2C basis. When combined with the nearby Roc field, the aggregate resource is around 884 billion cu ft. of gas and 36 million barrels of associated condensate on a gross 2C basis,” Mr Cook said. “These volumetric results reiterate the significance of the Dorado discovery and we look forward to maturing this resource and finding additional neighboring resources in our future drilling programs.”

The company’s 20% share of the gross contingent resources within the Dorado structure are as outlined in the table below (note, these figures do not include the contingent resources discovered in the nearby Roc field):

The contingent resources in the Roc field referred to in this announcement are 332 bcf of gas and 20 million barrels of condensate (gross, 2C basis). Refer to Carnarvon Petroleum’s ASX announcement on 23 April 2018 for detailed information on this resource. Carnarvon is not aware of any new information or data that materially affects the Roc resource information included in this report and that all material assumptions and technical parameters underpinning the estimates in this announcement continue to apply and have not materially changed.

The contingent resources have been calculated by Carnarvon Petroleum using deterministic and statistic volumetric methods based on the interpretation of porosity, hydrocarbon saturation and net reservoir thickness from the wireline logging program, the analysis of potential hydrocarbon columns from the pressure data and the fluid properties derived from the oil, gas and condensate samples and applied to the structure map with recovery factors calculated using analogues and industry standards.

These contingent resources have been aggregated by arithmetic summation. Hence the aggregate 1C may be a very conservative estimate, and the 3C may be a very optimistic estimate due to the portfolio effects of arithmetic summation.

These are classified as contingent resources according to SPE-PRMS guidelines as the potential development concept has not yet been finalized or sanctioned.