Record-breaking Carpentaria-3H (“C-3H”) drilled on time and under budget.

Empire Energy Group Limited (“Empire”) is pleased to provide shareholders with an update regarding its operations in the Beetaloo Sub-basin (“Beetaloo”), Northern Territory.

Comments from Managing Director Alex Underwood:

“The successful drilling of Carpentaria-3H, on time and below budget, and without any recordable health and safety or environmental incidents, demonstrates that the Empire team continues to lead the development of the Beetaloo Basin. The final cost of drilling and casing this well is likely to be lower than the cost of Empire’s first horizontal well, Carpentaria-2H, despite having double the length of horizontal section within the target Velkerri-B shale section, and lower than the cost of Empire’s first vertical well, Carpentaria-1. This clearly demonstrates the rapid learning curve we are progressing along, and further enhances the team’s confidence that we may be able to commercially extract very large volumes of gas from EP187.

The Empire team believes that our shallower acreage provides a development cost advantage. This has been reinforced by our Carpentaria-3H horizontal well that was drilled for less than a third of the cost of the Maverick-1V vertical well recently drilled in the deepest part of the basin.

Our technical team is analysing critical data from the recent successful Carpentaria-2H flow test, which is steering us towards further optimization of the fracture stimulation and perforation design for the upcoming Carpentaria-3H stimulation and flow testing program. We will soon re-enter Carpentaria-2H to run a Production Logging Tool (“PLT”) which will give us highly granular data about the relative contribution to flow rates from each fracture stimulation stage and each cluster within those stages in the Carpentaria-2H horizontal well section. These data, combined with tracer data collected during the initial C-2H flow testing program, will provide critical insights into the optimal way to fracture stimulate and flow test the Velkerri B shale.

We anticipate that our data-driven process of fracture stimulation and perforation design optimization, utilizing industry best practice technology and expertise, will drive continuous productivity improvements.

In the success case, this may result in Empire’s Beetaloo Basin gas being one of the lowest cost sources of large-scale gas supply into Australia’s critically short East Coast gas market and ultimately into the Asian LNG market, which will require responsibly sourced gas supply for many decades to support the energy transition.
Many thanks to our dedicated team for your hard work and professional approach, which has driven this excellent result. I look forward to sharing further news with shareholders in the coming weeks as we continue to execute the most active work program in the history of the Beetaloo Basin.”

Please click here to read the full announcement.