Australian offshore oil exploration company, Carnarvon Petroleum, has appointed MGPalaeo to build a stratigraphic database for Australia’s North West Shelf over the next twelve months.

MGPalaeo is a geological consultant company specializing in biostratigraphy servicing the oil and gas industry.

Carnarvon said on Monday that the database should cover the interpretation of approximately 3,000 wells drilled on the NWS. Carnarvon added that, when overlaid with the company’s existing database, it will provide powerful insights into the regional geology and prospectivity of the NWS.

Carnarvon’s Managing Director and CEO, Adrian Cook, said: “The Carnarvon management team has invested in building a ‘state of the art’ database covering the NWS, giving the Carnarvon geoscience team the very best tools to explore for new hydrocarbon accumulations.

“Our investment in our geoscience also includes building a high quality and consistent wireline log dataset; building a class-leading Triassic geochemical database, purchasing a satellite sweep database of the NWS, purchasing a comprehensive seismic and velocity dataset in our core NWS areas and acquiring significant new seismic data in potentially the next major NWS oil and gas province in the Roc/Phoenix areas.”

MGPalaeo will provide Carnarvon with the most recent interpretation of stratigraphical data. This data will cover modern re-evaluation of the first wells ever drilled in Australia to the most recently available data.

The aim of this data acquisition is to create new exploration theories and concepts not yet considered.