Brett Cole | Business Spectator | December 10, 2013 1:29PM
AMBASSADOR Oil and Gas has sold its 52.5 per cent stake in a potential gas field in South Australia's Cooper Basin to New Standard Energy for $42.5 million, which will fund exploration activities.
Ambassador has retained a 47.5 per cent stake. The sale proceeds are expected to cover five years of capital intensive work, including the drilling of two wells in 2015 and one in 2016, Tino Guglielmo, Ambassador's managing director, told DataRoom.
Guglielmo says his company is also looking to buy as much as $1 million worth of land in south-eastern Colorado, potentially including oil deposits that would be exploited through a similar agreement Ambassador struck with New Standard.
Surrounding the potential unconventional gas reserves in Ambassador and New Standard's Cooper Basin field is infrastructure that could pipe gas from a well six months after gas was discovered. That means gas could flow from the Cooper Basin field in 2015, says Guglielmo.
By 2015 liquid natural gas facilities around Gladstone will come on line, enabling Australian gas to be exported to Taiwan, China, Japan and South Korea. Such is the demand from North Asia that Guglielmo predicts the price of gas per gigajoule for raw producers such as his company will rise from the current $4 to between $6 and $8.
"The global LNG market is tapping into a very lucrative market in North Asia," he says. "These countries are willing to buy gas at a significant premium as they have no supply."
LNG plants that buy gas from potential producers such as Ambassador can sell it at $12 to $15 per gigajoule landed at a North Asian port, says Guglielmo
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