Australian Unconventional Hydrocarbon Exploration History and Assessments

Geoscience Australia and partners prepared an extended abstract and presentation for the APPEA Conference & Exhibition 2013. The text describes the history of Australia's petroleum exploration, shifting from onshore Paleozoic basins to offshore Mesozoic basins and back to onshore for shale and tight gas potential. The work cites specific discoveries like the Mereenie oil field and notes the onshore exploration license area nearly doubled from 2010 to 2012.

Use Cases

• Analyzing historical trends in Australian petroleum exploration based on the described shift from onshore to offshore and back.
• Studying the potential of specific geological basins like the Amadeus or Canning Basin for unconventional resources.
• Referencing documented discoveries such as the Mereenie oil field for regional resource assessments.

Strengths

• Includes specific historical dates and events, such as the discovery of the Mereenie oil field and the Blina discovery in the early 1980s.
• Cites a concrete metric: the onshore basin area under exploration license nearly doubled from 2010 to 2012.
• Provides a formal citation to a peer-reviewed journal article (The APPEA Journal).

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect temporal bias inherent to data_gov_au, as the core content is from a 2013 conference.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia and its partners in state and Northern Territory surveys, cited via the Australian Ocean Data Network.

Collection Method

New assessments and studies across a number of basins, compiled into a conference abstract and presentation.

Time Range

Historical coverage from early exploration through 2013, with specific references to the 1960s and 1980s.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-27 15:50:37.902122; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australia, with focus on onshore basins such as the Amadeus Basin and Canning Basin.