Central Petroleum

Central Petroleum Limited is an ASX listed junior exploration and production company operating the largest holding of prospective onshore acreage in Australia totalling over 270,000 km2, c.70 million acres. This acreage includes permits already awarded and acreage under application with 250,000 km2 under the Petroleum Acts and 20,000 km2 under the Mining Acts mainly in the Northern Territory with smaller holdings in Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland.

The acreage is entirely onshore and because of this, drilling costs are a fraction of those generally encountered offshore. The Company operates this acreage in one of the most fiscally and politically stable countries in the world, Australia.

The Company's main goal is to maximise shareholder returns by enhanced share value and ultimately by dividend payments. It aims to do this by operating a central Australian petroleum hub connected to appropriate infrastructure to allow the export to domestic and overseas markets of both primary energy resources and value added petroleum and helium products.

The Company plans to potentially capitalise on early cash flow from an oil discovery and is seeking to build gas resources to a threshold point where value-adding processes such as LNG and or GTL, for example, can be brought into play. With helium prices approaching $145 USD/1,000 scfg in the USA (The bulk price set by the BLM has been revised. As a result, Federal Crude Helium will be sold at $75.00 per thousand cubic feet in FY2011, compared to $64.75 in 2010, signalling a 15.8% price increase. This price covers helium debt repayment and interest and includes administrative and storage costs.) Helium production and sales are regarded as an intrinsic part of this overall strategy. Apart from conventional gas potential, the Company has had independent estimates of over 10,000 trillion cubic feet in UCG "syngas" prospective recoverable resources. Prospective recoverable resources of oil could be in excess of a billion barrels and there are large areas of coal in the Permian Pedirka basin.

The acreage includes the majority of the Pedirka Basin within the Northern Territory and South Australia, the majority of the Amadeus Basin in the Northern Territory, all of the known Lander Trough in the Northern Territory and approximately 25,000 km2 of the Southern Georgina Basin.

The Company was formed by Mr John Heugh and Mr Richard Faull in 1998 in a countercyclical strategy aimed at securing large acreage tracts with large prospective target structures in central Australia. Central Australia contains one commercial oil field and one commercial gas field with another large gas discovery remaining undeveloped. It is very probable that more commercial accumulations will be discovered, hence there is potential for the monetization of possible oil resources through trucking, rail or pipeline infrastructure. There is also potential for monetisation of possible large gas resources via Gas to Liquids (GTL) Fischer Tropsch (FT) processing to produce zero sulphur diesel, naphtha, jet fuel and LNG technology.

Very large coal accumulations present in the Pedirka Basin are also being explored with a view to examining monetisation via very large scale beneficiation and export, coal to liquids (CTL), co-generation of power and underground coal gasification (UCG). Any gas produced by UCG or coal gasification could be applied conceptually to value adding processes such as FT liquid production.