Oil and Gas

The Territory produces petroleum from the Amadeus Basin and is prospective for both conventional and unconventional hydrocarbons in a number of onshore sedimentary basins.  There is advanced stage exploration for onshore shale gas with large contingent resources in the Beetaloo Sub-basin, which is Australia’s most advanced shale gas play. Defined gas resources also exist in the onshore Bonaparte Basin and the Palaeoproterozoic stratigraphy of the McArthur Basin. Frontier basins such as the Pedrika Basin and Georgina Basin remain largely underexplored by world standards.

View the distribution of petroleum wells and seismic lines and download attributed spatial data across the Territory’s onshore basins through the Northern Territory Geological Survey’s (NTGS) online web mapping system STRIKE.

Petroleum regulation is administered by the Department of Industry, Tourism and Trade, this includes petroleum resource exploration and development and the construction and operation of oil and gas facilities and transmission pipelines. All tenure information and regulatory requirements can be found on the NT Government website and contacts found on the contact page.

Geoscience Australia maintains information on the Northern Territory's highly prospective offshore sedimentary basins and are regulated by the Federal government.