Mereenie has been fracced but only vertical wells. They did a...

Mereenie has been fracced but only vertical wells. They did a lot of fraccing of production wells there between the late 80s and the early 2000s.

I don't know about Palm Valley but I don't think they would have needed to frac at PV because it is so naturally fractured. One of the wells drilled there flowed at something like 150 MMscfd which is an insane rate for an onshore well. They may have fracced a few that didn't initially intersect the fracture network though.

These new wells are horizontal wells and that is usually actually better than fraccing a vertical well. A horizontal frac is the ultimate but that is very expensive and may not offer significant improvement over a plain horizontal well, particularly in a low permeability sand with natural fracturing which is what we have in the Amadeus. I fully support the plan to trial unfracced horizontals first.

In many ways, fracced verticals at Mereenie are obsolete technology. They are still useful in places like the Cooper where you have a thick section of discontinuous sands, but horizontals are better if you have a relatively thin, continuous reservoir.