WAPET
a pioneer oil and gas exploration and processing company
West Australian Petroleum Pty Ltd (WAPET) was an oil & gas exploration and processing company in Western Australia.
History
Formed in March 1952 as a joint venture between Ampol and Caltex, the company discovered Australia's first flowing oil in November the following year, at Rough Range on the North West Cape. The first oil discovery in Australia was made near Lakes Entrance, Victoria in 1924.
The Rough Range well flowed with heavy crude oil, initially at 400 barrels (64 m3) per day from a depth of 1099 metres, but further drilling in 1954 demonstrated the discovery to be small with low flow rates and it was deemed to be not commercial.
Dongara
In 1964 WAPET discovered the first commercial natural gas field in the state, at Dongara in the Perth Basin. The Dongara field is now wholly owned by Arc Energy and had produced 452.6×10^9 cu ft (1.282×1010 m3) of LNG to August 2007.
The Dongara discovery resulted in the construction of the first gas pipeline in Western Australia, from Dongara to Pinjarra in 1971 by a WAPET subsidiary, West Australian Natural Gas. Also known as the Parmelia Pipeline, it comprises 416 km of 350 mm diameter pipe.
Barrow Island
The company was joined by Shell as a partner in 1964 and shortly after, the joint venture made its major find, on Barrow Island. Despite an expectation of likely oil deposits, Barrow Island had had government bans on drilling and exploration due to the 1952 atomic bomb testing on the nearby Montebello Islands.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “WAPET” is a pioneer oil and gas exploration and processing company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through WAPET, pioneer and exploration, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2564154. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1924, 1099 and 1954.
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This entry incorporates text from “WAPET” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.