A joint venture of Santos Ltd. and Carnarvon Petroleum Ltd. has contracted the Noble Tom Prosser jackup rig to drill wildcat wells Pavo-1 and Apus-1 near the group’s previous oil and gas discovery at Dorado field off Western Australia.
The drilling program will begin late this year with Pavo-1 and immediately followed by Apus-1.
If successful, both prospects have the potential to materially increase the aggregate development resource for Dorado field with tiebacks to the Dorado facilities, Carnarvon said.
Pavo-1 will target a potential 100 MMboe while Apus has triple the potential with 307 MMboe.
The Noble Tom Prosser was previously used by the JV in 2019 to drill the successful Dorado-2 and Dorado-3 appraisals. Dorado was discovered in 2018 and has an estimated resource of at least 150 million b/o.
The Dorado development program is in a pre-front-end engineering and design stage with facilities being designed for production of 75,000-100,000 b/d of oil.