- 01CVN adds March Pavo South-1 and April Ara-1 wells at Bedout.
- 02Targets: 74MMboe Pavo extension; 191MMboe Ara prospect.
- 03~$20m well costs funded from $97m cash.
Carnarvon Energy (ASX: CVN) has added the Pavo South-1 and Ara-1 oil wells to its planned multi-well exploration drilling campaign in the new year at the Bedout sub-basin in offshore Western Australia.
The high-impact campaign aims to define the scale of the sub-basin’s resource potential and will target some of the largest prospects in the exploration portfolio.
Drilling at Pavo South-1, which is scheduled to begin in March using a jack-up rig suited to water depths of less than 100 metres, follows recent work at the nearby Pavo field discovered in 2022.
Carnarvon and its Bedout joint venture partners Santos Energy (ASX: STO)—which holds 80% equity—and CPC Corporation Taiwan (10%) are targeting a 74 million barrels of oil equivalent extension to the Pavo field, with an estimated 64% geological chance of success.
A successful program could materially enhance the scale and value of the greater Pavo resource base and significantly enhance the proposed Dorado oil development, including potential future tie-back to Dorado infrastructure 46 kilometres west-northwest of Pavo South-1.
De-Risking Prospects
Preparations are on track for drilling at Ara-1 to commence in April, utilising a semi-submersible mobile offshore rig owned by Swiss contractor Transocean to target the previously untested northern fairway of the Bedout permits.
Success could open a new play for the joint venture partners while derisking a number of other nearby material prospects and confirming the scale of Bedout, one of Australia’s premier emerging oil and gas basins that has so far generated a number of discoveries.
Roughly the size of the Dorado field, the Ara prospect is estimated to contain 191MMboe of recoverable hydrocarbons, with a 37% chance of geological success.
Carnarvon’s share of costs for both wells is expected to be around $20 million, which it will fund from its $97m cash balance (at end September).
Chief executive officer Philip Huizenga said the company’s 20% equity interest would provide “meaningful exposure to an expected positive result”.
Bedout Resource Increase
Carnarvon reported a 92% increase to Bedout’s resource inventory in June, following interpretation of the Bedout Mega-Merge seismic reprocessing project and significantly improved subsurface imaging from the integration of multiple high‑quality surveys.
Total gross prospective resources now sit at 6,256MMboe across 130 prospects, compared to 3,263MMboe reported in the previous corresponding period.
Mr Huizenga said the update reinforced the “exceptional upside” that remains in the lightly explored basin.
“We believe Bedout has the potential to become Australia’s next Carnarvon Basin, and the breadth and scale of our exploration portfolio, linked to the latest high-quality data, is only just beginning to be tested,” he said.
“Fewer than a dozen exploration wells have been drilled across the basin to date and only six of them have used modern datasets, yet we have already delivered multiple high‑quality, world‑class discoveries.”
“This early success from such a small number of penetrations highlights the step‑change running room that could still lie ahead.”
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