Big Star Energy has secured 21,824 gross acres in 63 new leases in Colorado, the United States at the state land auction.
The independent oil and gas exploration and production company that is headquartered in Australia and operates in North America are commending its transformational moment for the company.
Big Star managing director Joanne Kendrick said this move had made the company the “dominant player in this highly prospective area.”
“These acquisitions at the state land auction, in addition to our existing acreage, bring us to 27,104 gross acres across nine prospects, significantly exceeding our target,” Kendrick said.
“Encouragingly, we now have three prospects where our leases include locations sampled during our recent soil gas survey.
“All samples collected on the land that we have now leased returned positive helium readings of between 10–50 per cent above normal atmospheric levels confirming an active helium system in the area.”
Following its recent successful helium acreage acquisition, Kendrick is excited to make a start on Big Star’s next objective.
Big Star plans to design and permit a five-well drilling program early next year while consolidating its acreage over these prospects.
“With success in our proposed drilling campaign, any discovered high-concentration helium accumulation would potentially be developed using a pressure swig adsorption plant,” Kendrick said.
“A standard-size PSA plant can process two million cubic feet a day of raw gas (with 5–10 per cent helium) to a saleable product stream with 98 per cent plus helium concentration and requires between 5,000-10,000 acres to fill capacity.
“Big Star’s prospects and leads ranking has been driven by our regional and local structural mapping, proximity to historic high-concentration helium wells and the active helium systems proven by our proprietary regional soil gas survey completed earlier this year.”
The continued integration of proprietary geophysical and helium soil gas survey data into the geologic model over the last two months has resulted in improved delineation and greater confidence in prospect sizes and ranking.
Furthermore, the areal extent of Enterprise has increased significantly as a result of this latest work.
Acreage over the previously leased Enterprise has increased by over 160 per cent and seven new prospects now have substantial leasing as a result of the state auction acquisitions.
This includes two prospects outside of Enterprise, where soil gas samples were collected from currently leased areas and returned positive helium readings.