Operator Mountain Petroleum is now running wireline logs to evaluate the significance of hydrocarbon shows seen during drilling, according to VicPet.

The wildcat is the first well to spud in the West Florence oil and gas project and its 12,000 acres (4856 hectares) of associated leasehold, located in the Florence Sub-basin of the Denver Basin, about 100km south of Denver.

The project area is to the west of the Florence oil field, which produced about 15 million barrels of oil from fractured shales of the Pierre Formation in the 1940s.

The West Florence play has been estimated to contain a potential 100-200 billion cubic feet of recoverable gas in the Muddy J sandstone, as well as 5MMbbl of recoverable oil in each of the Codell Sandstone, Niobrara Formation and the Pierre Formation.

With Denver-based Mountain Petroleum as operator, Australian interests in the project are VicPet (25%), Fall River (15%) and Adelaide Energy (10%).