ADX lines up a bevy of oil and gas targets to boost Europe’s energy supplies

While recent attention has been on the planned drilling of the Giant Welchau gas prospect ADX’s Anshof-3 oil well in Upper Austria marks the beginning of a sustained drilling effort that could deliver greatly increased energy resources and production in the heart of Europe.

The most immediate effort at Anshof is to boost production with the planned drilling of the Anshof-2 and Anshof-1 appraisal wells, the success of Anshof-3 has also validated the company’s structural interpretation that the historical ASCH-1 well which flowed oil to surface had intersected the oil leg of a large updip structure at Gruenburg.

This has substantially de-risked the Gruenburg exploration prospect which is adjacent to the Anshof field, has best technical prospective resources of about 9.5 million barrels of oil equivalent.

ADX Energy (ASX:ADX) has also matured three new shallow gas prospects at its ADX AT-I licence after using a combination of AI software, an international team of stratigraphic trap experts and local knowledge to enhance its portfolio of exploration targets.

This has highlighted large stratigraphic upside potential at the three prospects with proven high permeability reservoirs – Schoe, Hoch and Gast, which could host best technical prospective resources of 6.6 billion cubic feet (Bcf), 4.8Bcf and 3.6Bcf respectively. Importantly these targets are shallow to drill and quick to develop.

Additional follow up prospects in this innovative new play-type are also being generated.

Ongoing technical work incorporating structural modelling, section balancing and field studies have also resulted in the generation of several new prospects as follow-ups of the planned Welchau-1 gas well that will test the giant Welchau gas prospect in Upper Austria.

ADX has estimated that Welchau could host 651 Bcf of gas and 26 million barrels of condensate and has also assessed the historical Molln-1 gas discovery is a potential appraisal candidate.

Further gas prospectivity

In addition to Welchau and new shallow gas prospects in the ADX AT-I license further analysis of analogous gas reservoirs in a nearby gas field has led ADX to significantly upgrade the expected possible net gas pay thickness at the IRR-1 prospect.

The company noted that the 3D seismic response at IRR-1 is similar to an adjacent gas field which has produced about 155Bcf of gas from Miocene deep water turbidite reservoirs that have proven flow capacity of up to 45 million standard cubic feet of gas per day.

ADX believes IRR-1 could host a best technical prospective resource of 38 Bcf of gas.

Geothermal potential

Oil and gas are not the only sources of energy that ADX is pursuing. While geothermal is big business across the border in Germany it has not been pursued extensively in Austria despite hosting the same geology.

ADX’ GMU prospect combines a proven geothermal opportunity in the Molasse basin with multiple overlying oil and gas targets defined on 3D seismic that could be drilled with single well.

The high productivity oil and gas reservoirs have an estimated best technical resource of 3.9 MMboe while the deeper, low risk geothermal target could generate up to 18MW of thermal power. With soaring power prices in Europe renewable geothermal energy has growing appeal for nearby district heating and power generation opportunities.

This article was developed in collaboration with ADX Energy, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.