Sources said the Petroleum Advisory Board is meeting on 27 June to evaluate the bids.
It is understood the applicants include majors and smaller companies all with existing upstream portfolios in Papua New Guinea, and there are also possibly bids from newcomers.
The Pandora field had been held under a retention lease for 15 years, and under PNG law it had to be relinquished because 15 years is the maximum term for such a contract.
The owners of Block PRL-1 were Talisman, Oil Search, ExxonMobil, Eni and Claremont Petroleum.
Pandora is an old field discovered in 1988 and has hosted two wells.
It is quite a large resource with contingent reserves understood to exceed 1 trillion cubic feet of gas.
The field was initially earmarked as part of the PNG-to-Australia gas pipeline project, which was superseded by the PNG liquefied natural gas project but excluded Pandora’s gas as feedstock.
Oil Search said previously that Pandora has remained undeveloped for two reasons — there is no domestic gas market to underpin its development, and it has a high sulphur content.
Sources said there is so much industry interest in Pandora because activity is picking up in the Gulf of Papua and because of the LNG opportunity.
Sources said Oil Search is one of the bidders, which is no surprise given the company is currently in the midst of an offshore exploration drilling campaign in the vicinity as Pandora.
So far, it has a discovery with the Flinders-1 probe, and is drilling ahead on Hagana-1, which will be followed by a well on the Kidukidu prospect.
Oil Search’s ambition is to find enough gas — with no impurities — to underpin either a standalone LNG project or supply a new train.
“The nasties we know exist in the Gulf of Papua, they sit in the Pandora field where the gas is trapped in carbonate reservoirs. That’s integral to the source of the (hydrogen sulphide) that we’ve seen there,” said a company spokesperson.
He said the reservoirs at Flinders, Hagana and Kidukidu are “very different”.
