Flooding in Queensland, Australia has forced at least two coalbed methane (CBM) outfits working in the Surat basin to close down operations.

"To a large extent the roads are impassable - you can't move logistics in or out of the area to sustain businesses," said David Breeze, general manager of the Surat Basin Corporation, to Reuters.

"The oil and gas industry operates in difficult areas, off the main highways where there are only gravel tracks so most of the oil companies had stopped operations at this time," he added.

The companies experiencing a suspension in activity, Easternwell Group and Savanna Energy, are active in Queensland's Surat basin – an area located in the southwest region of the state.

Two rigs operated by Savanna, a company based out of Calgary, have been marooned by floods. Savanna said one of the units, worth about $6 million, is believed to have been severely damaged.

“Extreme rainfall had curtailed our operations throughout much of December [and] the rigs are currently inaccessible,” said Savanna in a Jan. 5 press release.

Prior to the disaster, Savanna was drilling the CBM wells for Australia Pacific Liquefied Natural Gas, a joint venture between Australia’s Origin Energy and US supermajor ConocoPhillips. The $25 billion project will connect the wells by pipeline to a new LNG plant at the port city of Gladstone.

Origin Energy’s spokesman Tim Scott told Reuters the company shut in about a dozen production wells of the 300 it operates in the Surat and Bowen basins.

"All of our CBM exploration activities are on hold at the moment," said Scott, adding that he did not foresee any delay to the construction of the company's export project and there had been no material impact so far.

Other Australian CBM operators, including Santos and BG Group, said that so far the floods have had a minimal impact on operations