The section formed about 18 months ago to provide federal and state governments with assessments of Australia’s potential for shale gas and other unconventional hydrocarbon resources.

The activity was stepped up with the launch of a Georgina Basin pilot study, which is designed to establish a framework and skill base for the unconventional prospectivity assessments around the country.

Geoscience Australia section head Dr Andrew Stacey said the aim was to publish an unconventional prospectivity assessment of the Georgina Basin by the end of the year.

It will be followed by a resource assessment, which will put figures on the potential size of the basin’s total unconventional resources in the public domain for the first time.

Stacey said the only publicly available data on unconventional resource potential in Australia was from the US Department of Energy, which published in 2011 an estimate of 396 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable shale gas based on only four basins – the Canning, Cooper, Maryborough and Perth basins.

“The Department of Energy numbers are based on a very high-level methodology that is quite coarse,” he said.

“We are using a method developed by the US Geological Survey, which is an internationally benchmarked system.”

Stacey said GA was working closely with the USGS to build its capabilities in unconventional resource assessment.

He said the USGS was also undertaking its own studies of Australia.

“The USGS are going to assess the South Australian side of the Cooper Basin, starting in August,” Stacey said.

“They are also interested in collaborating with Australian agencies on the Canning, Perth and Bowen-Surat basins. These are basins that they see as having global significance.”

The GA unit will take a much broader look at unconventionals than shale gas and help build a richer understanding of Australia’s unique geology and opportunities.

Stacey said a good example was the Cooper Basin, where most attention was focused on the shale gas play in the Roseneath, Epsilon and Murteree formations.

“As you go down into the Patchawarra there is gas saturation through that as well,” he said.

“The Cooper is what you might call a hybrid system of a shale gas play and a tight gas play, with a deep coal seam gas play underneath it.

“When the USGS assess that, it will be as one big unit. We are starting to look at that as a basin-centred gas accumulation rather than just a shale gas play.”

Stacey said the arrival of unconventional oil and gas had opened many people’s eyes to a much greater potential for hydrocarbons in Australia.

“Every sedimentary basin has become prospective,” he said.

“In the past we have been looking for conventional accumulations.

“We now need to go back to wherever we have seen potential indications or oil/gas shows and start thinking about the potential for unconventional accumulations.

“The exploration work Armour Energy is doing in the McArthur Basin is a good example. They have found gas and oil in Proterozoic rocks.

“Ten years ago, I don’t think anyone in the industry would have imagined that was possible.”

Armour’s Glyde-1 lateral well flowed gas at a rate of up to 3.3 million cubic feet per day without fraccing.

The well was drilled over a horizontal distance of 220m through the naturally fractured Coxco dolomite, which sits beneath the basin’s primary source rock known as the Barney Creek shale.

Stacey said the Georgina Basin was selected for the study because it was interesting for a number of reasons.

“Historically, there are numerous oil and gas shows and we know that there are a number of petroleum systems but there has been no exploration success,” he said.

“It’s a good basin for our team because there is enough information to get stuck into and work through our program.

“It is also part of the Centralian super basin system, which includes the Wiso, the Daly and Amadeus basins.

“We have good information about the Georgina and Amadeus basins but the Wiso and Daly are largely unknown.

“If we can develop some analogues in the Georgina we can take those to other parts of the Centralian super basin.”

Geoscience Australia geochemist Dr Dianne Edwards said the Georgina Basin was a good place to begin because it overlapped the Northern Territory and Queensland and was of interest to more than one government or territory.

"The regional work we are doing provides a context for private explorers. No one company is across all the prospective areas,” Edwards said.

“GA specialises in biostratigraphic and organic geochemical studies to determine the potential of source rock units within a basin.

“We can study the large areas of a basin in between where the companies are drilling, where there are no wells and only the odd seismic line.

“We go in and understand the palynological work and understand the facies changes, which may lead to an increase in the area of potential source rocks."

GA’s assessment of the Georgina Basin began last August with the sampling of old core from previous exploration wells and a number of wells drilled by new explorers in the basin.

Types of analysis conducted by GA include screening of source rocks by Rock-Eval pyrolysis and total organic carbon.

Selected immature samples will have compositional kinetics run on their kerogen to determine their ultimate potential and gas-oil ratios.

Molecular and isotopic studies will be conducted on gases and oils from recent drilling to understand the hydrocarbon families in the basin.

GA’s onshore hydrocarbon section is also looking at some interesting opportunities in unconventional hydrocarbons.

These include deep CSG in the Bowen-Surat basins and stacked plays in the Eromanga Basin overlying the Galilee Basin.

Another area is biogenic gas in brown coal basins.

ExxonMobil is already exploring for biogenic gas in the low rank coals of the Gippsland basin but GA believes there could also be potential in the vast areas of brown coal in the Murray and Eromanga basins.