A company facing fines for refusing to front a senate committee investigating gas subsidies has overnight become the biggest player in the Northern Territory's Beetaloo Basin.
After racing to raise millions of dollars in investments, the company now has power to explore for gas buried deep in the basin, across almost 2 million acres.
Origin Energy announced on Monday it would be abandoning plans to frack for gas amid what it described as "uncertain and expensive efforts to drive the projects into the production phase".
Tamboran locked in more than $195 million from investors in a matter of days, of which more than half came from "strategic money out of the US", according to the company's chief executive Joel Riddle.