Any deeper, and they would have cooked under the intense heat and pressure produced by the earth’s crust.

If the long-dead sea creatures who formed the shale were any shallower than two to three kilometres deep the gases may have already escaped some time over the past billion or so years.

Origin Energy’s chief geologist David Close has a fragment of the Beetaloo shale rocks on his desk.

“It hasn’t see the light of day for a billion years, it is hard to get your head around how lucky we are they are there, it is a fluke.”

This is ground zero of the Northern Territory’s flirtation with fracking – or the hydraulic fracturing of rock to produce onshore unconventional gas.

Origin this week took a tour of media to the NT’s only fracking well, here at Amungee Amungee Station about 50km south-east of Daly Waters, or a bit over an hour from Mataranka.

To Origin it is part of their EP98 licence, their discovery is to the world a great treasure.

Some say there is enough gas here to supply Australia’s domestic needs for 200 years.

One expert said the Beetaloo contains as much gas as one fifth of all the shale gas produced in the US, which still pioneers the revolution in fracking.

At some mine sites there is a hint of what is going on below, a watercourse or ravine, a change in vegetation.

Here at Amungee there is nothing.

This two hectares hacked out of the wilderness looks pretty much the same as thousands of square kilometres of featureless NT.

To the visiting journalists it must seem like the middle of absolutely nowhere.

Most of them were flown by Origin to Darwin, an overnight stay and another flight to Daly Waters, and then by bus to Amungee.

A long way to see not very much.

Those involved in the fracking debate know appearances can be deceiving, it’s what lies underneath the ground, the aquifers, which can link whole regions with life giving water.

The pad has pretty much been scraped clean of the tanks, ponds, drilling and or course the burn-off flare which once occupied this site.

Today Origin’s NW-1H well looks pretty lonely.

The “Christmas tree” or well-head of pipes and gauges still plugs the deep hole but there is no sign this one well could have stirred up such emotions.

The NT Government’s moratorium put an end to its short life, or perhaps a pause if Origin and other miners win the go ahead early next year.

Earlier this year Origin was able to squeeze in 57 days of testing here.

Dr Close is too much the staid academic but there must have been a “Eureka” moment when the well began producing gas, lots of it.

The drill went down 2.4 kilometres to hit the shale seam.

Then the super-expensive well bit (some say it costs more than $5m) went a kilometre sideways along the seam and fracking began.

Water and chemicals went down the drill hole under great pressure, cracked the shale and then held the cracks open to allow the long-buried gas to escape.

As much as one terajoule of gas gushed from the well each day, over many days.

The NT uses about 60 terajoules a day for its energy needs, so 60 Amungees would keep the lights on for a long time.

“It is unlikely we drilled the best well in the basin,” Dr Close said.

“There are probably better, there are probably worse.”

The water and fracking chemicals used at Amungee were stored on site, in a pond which has now disappeared.

The residue was trucked away to Queensland, a better system will need to be found in fracking is allowed here.

You can see why people from the Prime Minister down are so excited about the possibility of the Beetaloo, this vast shale field between Katherine and Tennant Creek.

Of course, those producing the gas also have an eye to the export market.

The PM wants to make sure the Gladstone export terminals are chugging along but the east coast still has cheap power as well.

Origin says there is more testing to be done on the Beetaloo and it will likely take them a year to fire up the drills again.

Their representative organisation, the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, is a tad more bullish.

“The industry is ready to invest billions in the NT when – and if – the government’s fracking moratorium is lifted,” APPEA NT Director Matthew Doman said last week.