Chevron Corp.’s decision to pull out of a natural gas project in Australia after a plunge in oil prices is a signal it’s going to take even longer for the nation to realize its shale ambitions.
Tapping Australia’s shale oil and gas was already challenging due to high drilling costs and the remote locations of its fields, with significant production forecast to be at least several years away. An almost 50 percent drop in the price of crude over the past year makes it harder.
“The pace will be considerably slower than anyone would have forecast 18 months to two years ago,” Geoffrey Cann, Australian director of oil and gas for Deloitte LLP in Brisbane, said in a phone interview.
The languishing oil prices are stalling efforts to replicate the U.S. shale boom globally. Big producers ConocoPhillips, Hess Corp. and Statoil ASA have already beaten Chevron out the shale door in Australia.
Just two years ago, Chevron had agreed to pay as much as $349 million to join Beach Energy Ltd. in its first shale investment in Australia. Lux Research said last year that Australia was “primed to become the next big play” in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
New Standard Energy Ltd. has failed to find partners to replace ConocoPhillips and PetroChina Co. in its shale acreage in Western Australia after hiring advisers in October. The company has fallen about 95 percent in Sydney trading over the past 12 months.
“The global downturn will continue to negatively impact pure exploration plays” in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, New Standard Managing Director Phil Thick said in an e-mailed response to questions. He said his company continues to hold talks over its shale assets.
Australia has the seventh-biggest potential shale gas resources and sixth-biggest shale oil resources in the world, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated last year.
Although shale basins will get pushed back on the list of priorities for large oil companies, Australian shale explorers will probably get some benefit from declining costs amid the downturn in prices, Deloitte’s Cann said.
If the huge natural gas export projects on Australia’s east coast can’t secure enough supplies long term to feed their developments, they may still turn to the Cooper Basin’s unconventional resources as a “Plan B,” Nik Burns, a Melbourne-based analyst at UBS Group AG, said by phone.
BG, operator of a liquefied natural gas project in Queensland, is exploring in the Cooper Basin with Drillsearch Energy Ltd. and remains committed to the region, according to the company’s Australian unit.
Beach is looking for new partners and will carry out further studies through next year on the exploration venture in the Cooper Basin, the company said Friday. It said the project remains “potentially significant on a global scale.”
Companies are going to find it difficult to attract funding to shale until oil prices recover, said UBS’ Burns. “You can argue that the unlocking of any shale potential in Australia has been pushed out a number of years.”
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