Cooper Basin activities – oil production, development and exploration

Our activities

The Cooper Basin is an ancient (Permo-Carboniferous to Triassic) basin located in northeast South Australia and southwest Queensland. It is overlain by the Early Jurassic to Late Cretaceous aged Eromanga Basin, which covers an area of approximately 1 million km².

We hold non-operating interests in onshore South Australia oil production licences and exploration leases in the western flank area of the Cooper/Eromanga Basin. Over 3,000 exploration, appraisal and development wells have been drilled in the South Australian Cooper/Eromanga Basin. Since 1970, the estimated cumulative production in South Australia only is over 5.7 Tcf of gas, 240 MMbbl of oil and 89 MMboe of condensate.

Since Cooper Energy’s first oil field discovery at Sellicks-1 in 2002, over 20 million barrels of oil have been produced from our production licenses. In FY22, our Cooper/Eromanga Basin oil fields delivered approximately 500 kbbls of oil in total. On an MMboe basis, onshore oil production accounted for four per cent of the total company production in FY22.

Find out more

Geoscience Australia: Cooper Basin prospectivity study