secret-to-success--have-great-neighbours-

Extract from the Canberra Times

Along with fellow oil and gas miners Beach Energy and Drill Search, Icon is lucky enough to have exploration rights over the biggest shale rock acreage in the Cooper Basin, which is located on the border of Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales.

The land area we are talking about here is immense - something like 5670 square kilometres.

Icon is a reminder that there are some companies for whom profit results are very much a secondary consideration. In this case, the minnow's close association with Beach Energy, whose market cap is almost $2 billion, is the key.

Icon and Beach own 40 per cent and 60 per cent respectively of the block ATP 855P. This is next door to a Beach-owned block, PEL 218, where there has already been excitement. Beach drilled one well last year and came out with a 2 trillion cubic feet (TCF) ''contingent resource'' of gas.

This is huge, but unproven. Beach will have to do much more drilling to get the resource to the stage where it's classified as a ''reserve'' and profits can be inferred.

To give you an idea of where this could lead, Woodside's Pluto LNG train, located north of Karratha in Western Australia, which is 4TCF of proven gas reserves, is valued by Bell Potter at $12 billion.

What is being ''inferred'' by many, is that ATP 855's potential is going up. This is based on the drilling in PEL 218 and Beach's expertise in the dark art of fracking.

Beach is the operator of ATP 855 and has committed to drill the well in the second half of this year. It will be drilled horizontally by Beach, which means its potential could skyrocket.

In the world of speculation, near-ology can equate to profit certainty.