Unconventional Hydrocarbons: Australia's Onshore Petroleum Potential

Geoscience Australia and its partners prepared an extended abstract and presentation for the APPEA Conference & Exhibition 2013 in Brisbane. The work discusses Australia's shift in petroleum exploration focus back to onshore basins, where the exploration license area nearly doubled from 2010 to 2012. It cites discoveries like the Mereenie oil field and the Blina discovery, and notes that about 90% or more of Australia's conventional oil and gas is now in offshore Mesozoic marginal basins.

Use Cases

• Assessing the potential for shale and tight gas resources based on descriptions of lower Paleozoic and Proterozoic petroleum systems.
• Analyzing historical exploration trends based on the timeline of discoveries from the 1960s to the 2010s.
• Studying the geographic shift in exploration activity between onshore and offshore Australian basins.
• Evaluating the involvement of international companies in testing Australia's older rock formations.

Strengths

• Provides a specific historical timeline of key discoveries and exploration shifts from the 1960s to 2013.
• Cites concrete figures, such as the near-doubling of onshore exploration license area from 2010 to 2012 and that about 90% of conventional resources are offshore.
• Authored by researchers from Geoscience Australia and state/NT surveys, indicating authoritative provenance.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The primary data formats are HTML and PDF, which are not inherently structured for analysis.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network (via data.gov.au)

Collection Method

Extended abstract and presentation prepared for a professional conference.

Time Range

Historical coverage from the 1960s to 2013, with a focus on trends up to 2012.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-17 00:36:59.064999; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Australia, specifically its onshore and offshore sedimentary basins.