devonian carbonate play, page-16

Supertramp out of interest anymore comments from your buddies from Santos? You said you were going to follow up with them.

Was doing a bit of CTP reading (as you do - lol), and I found this little snippet from a 2005 article. I don't know anything about Santos, but has anyone considered them as the potential suitor? Is that still the case that their contracts run out in 2009? Just food for thought....all comments welcome.

"Gas
Although monetising gas in central Australia could be difficult due to a lack of markets, one option could be to take over after Santos and Magellan (the Palm Valley and Mereenie prospect partners who are exporting gas via the Alice to Darwin pipeline) run out of gas. “They’ve got enough gas to supply the current contract until about 2009”, he said. “There are limited amounts of gas drilled reserves in the Amadeus that they can tap into and, subject to listing, shortly Central will control all of the most prospective Amadeus Basin acreage … subject to the listing we’ll acquire about 80-90% of the total acreage in the Amadeus Basin, so there’s no other gas exploration of real substance that Santos and Magellan can move into.” However, this could be as late as 2009 or 2010 and by then some of the offshore discoveries might have been brought on stream to supply Darwin with sales gas.

Central is therefore considering two approaches. The company could “discover a gas reserve of sufficient size to warrant connecting it to the pipeline to Moomba” – this discovery would have to be in the order of 200 Bcf to justify a connection. The other option outlined in a pre-feasibility study by Holt Campbell and Payton, based upon notional gas discovery and conversion by GTL (gas to liquids technology) into syn-fuel of two main types: Low sulphur, low pollution synthetic diesel and jet fuel; with naphtha as a co-product. “All three products could be produced in situ in the Amadeus Basin or anywhere in central Australia close to a rail facility and railed out to either Darwin or Adelaide”, explained Mr Heugh. “Our independent report on this indicates that probably most, if not all, of that product would be absorbed by the domestic market, particularly now that Australia is forecast to be only 40% self-sufficient in oil by the year 2010.”

“There have been a lot of developments in GTL technology and there’s a huge demand for low sulphur diesel throughout the world … and this trend is coming here.” This particular type of diesel is very environmentally friendly and can be mixed with conventional diesel to make reduce pollution at an economical price: “About 20% of syn-fuel diesel will get you inside all of the environmental legislations that are planned until at least the year 2010. We think that is a very positive development.” Central has also lodged a provisional patent application for the novel application of GTL in central Australia on specific gas reserves."

http://www.pesa.com.au/publications/pesa_news/aug_05/pesanews_7718.html

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Interesting story which ever way it plays.