Crafted from successful Eagle Ford Shale player Aurora Oil & Gas, Lusted said Australis was formed "as soon as Aurora was sold" to Canada's Batex Energy for $2.6 billion to keep the core team of Lusted, chairman Jon Stewart and Graham Dowland together.

"It made sense to retain the skill set we had," Lusted said.

The trio started looking for projects in late 2014, but at the time the oil price was still much higher, and there didn't appear to be any sensible deals on offer in the US, so the net was cast wider, and it is still looking despite two foundation assets being secured.

Australis believes the time is ripe to accumulate assets in order to create a runway of projects, using the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale and Portugal as a base.

"In Louisiana we have an existing position in the TMS, and we will do work on that. We are looking to renew some of those leases, and because of the situation in the US the cost basis for leasing some of the least established plays is relatively low," he said.

"We will also look to add to the position".

Lusted said it could be as soon as weeks after listing before further projects are added after listing.

To date some $37 million has been raised in seed funding, $11 million of which has come from the board and management to set the company up for success.

Lusted said the IPO was aimed at bringing institutional shareholders who had been along for the Aurora ride onto the register, and he expressed a hope that they will be willing to put in more cash if or when the company seeks to add more assets, most likely in the US.

Flagship

Lusted said the flagship TMS leases are is an area he said had enjoyed a "gentle" start over the years with the focus on the Eagle Ford and other areas.

Success in the Eagle Ford had seen land grab and 80-90 horizontal wells drilled in the play to define some of the better areas along the Gulf Coast, but positions are now opening up as the incumbent players move out to chase easier picking.

Australis owns a 50% working interest in around 33,000 mostly contiguous acres within the TMS Core Area, mostly in Louisiana, that it secured for $US16 million from Paloma Partners.

The work program is primarily aimed at renewing leases, particularly for the first 12 months, with the aim to treat it as a real estate play while the oil price recovers and drilling resumes.

Lusted said Australis believes it will be able to shortcut the first 4-5 years of the Aurora story, which were filled with blood, sweat, tears and a steep learning curve.

"Others have delineated a relatively small portion of the overall play, where there is a consistency in the wells, and we know they are prolific. We know that from an oil perspective it trades at a premium to WTI," he said.

"The position we have picked up is entirely in the production fairway, so we are confident our acreage will provide strong well performance."

There have been some very expensive wells in the past, but Australis is comfortable with its plans going forward in what has been perceived as an inconsistent and expensive play.

"There has been a lot learned about the TMS, and a lot of players have left to look at the cheaper Eagle Ford, Permian Basin or the Bakken," Lusted said.

"Unfortunately for those who have been in the TMS it only reached that inflection point where costs and production worked just as the oil price started to fall, so consequently that's where the opportunity."

Encana is a neighbour of Australis and it has some prolific wells nearby, and while it has let some assets go in North America it has maintained its TMS leases, which Lusted finds encouraging.

Australis has net contingent resources of 12.96MMbbl and 4.54Bcf and plenty of upside.

Portugal

Portugal had been something Lusted had looked at in an earlier life, when the focus was on the same Lias Shale play that was being chased through northern Europe, but it has always been an intriguing area.

In the years since 2009 around $100 million had been spent by a TSX-listed company, Porto Energy, on a large data gathering program, shooting 2D and 3D seismic and aeromagnetic surveys across much of the Lusitanian Basin.

The Canadian concern helped generate a much clearer image of the basin, but it ran short of funds and was unable to secure a funding partner, so Porto wound up operations in May 2014.

Australis was then able to acquire the data for a nominal cost, and just over one year later it secured the Pombal and Batalha concessions. A third, Cadaval, is still to be awarded.

Lusted says Portugal ticks all the boxes from a technical and fiscal perspective.

"While there had not been a lot of drilling pretty much every well had some hydrocarbons, so there was definitely a working petroleum system, but there has been almost no structured exploration," he told Energy News.

"People were literally drilling surface seeps and suing surface topography and extrapolating at depth.

"The gas price in Portugal is different from the rest of Europe. The Pyrenees Act is a geographic barrier in terms of connectivity so the gas price is heavily linked to the LNG price, and it has a premium to European prices, so we don't have to have too big a discovery to make it viable," he said.

"[Porto] produced gas to surface from one particular accumulation, and we are now using 3D seismic to better understand where that sits, and of course the concessions have unconventional prospectivity as well."

Unlike an increasing number of European nations, Portugal allows fraccing and the government is supportive of attempts to produce indigenous hydrocarbons.

Australis will spend just 6% of the $30 million raised being for technical work in Portugal over the next three years, with the aim to follow a very familiar plan.

"We own the asset effectively at 100% and in time honoured tradition in due course we will bring in a funding partner when we think we have the play to a point where it justifies it," Lusted said.

The two granted concessions cover some 620,000 acres.

Past drilling in its leases include Aljubarrota-2, drilled in 1999, which found gas shows continuously from 796-3616m and intermittent oil shows between 800-2350m, but the well produced only water, probably due to formation damage despite the target Silves sand horizons having poor to good reservoir characteristics, with porosities as high as 20%.

Gas from the shallow Jurassic horizons flowed at 2MMcfpd and there were good shows in the unconventional Lias shale and from the fractured carbonate Brenha formation, but later attempts to sidetrack into a separate Brenha formation fault block were largely unsuccessful.

Australis has defined eight prospects so far, with the contingent resource within the Brenha limestone of 83.59Bcf (1C) and 234.11Bcf (2C).

With Portugal ticking along in the background, hopefully avoiding Porto's errors, the lion's share of the IPO funds will be spent in Louisiana, with a well in Portugal possible but unlikely over the next three years to target the existing discovery and assess the unconventional prospectivity.