Anadarko Petroleum is moving close to a spud on a long-awaited wildcat well in frontier deepwater south of New Zealand, with the US independent on an elephant hunt in order to prove up sufficient resources for a development in one of the world’s remotest offshore areas.

A minimum 4 Tcf of gas would need to be found to at least spark continued interest in further exploration, although after nearly 15 years since the last deepwater well the operator and other companies with assets there will be keen for any promising well results to spur further wells.

Although New Zealand’s domestic market is not enough to spur a major development, the arrival of Floating Liquefied Natural Gas (FLNG) technology as a viable commercial option in (relatively) nearby Australia means that a large gas find is now a more attractive proposition.

Shell, one of the FLNG pioneers, has assets offshore New Zealand and will be watching Anadarko’s well with interest. The US explorer and its partner Origin Energy of Australia will drill two wildcats starting later this month, starting with a probe in the deepwater Taranaki Basin off the coastal shelf. The second will be drilled early next year in the Canterbury basin off the South Island’s eastern shore.

“The formations we’re looking at are large, they look like they have the potential to meet our criteria for multiple trillions of cubic feet of gas,” said Alan Seay, a spokesman at Anadarko in New Zealand, according to Reuters. “We’re seeing similar-sized formations to what we’ve seen in places like Mozambique,” he added.

New Zealand has 18 oil and gas basins, although only the Taranaki basin off the west coast of the North Island is producing. The rest remain almost untouched. Taranaki has more than a dozen operating fields and produces about 40,000 b/d of oil and 450 MMcf/d of gas.

Only seven deepwater wells have so far been drilled offshore New Zealand, six way back between 1976 to 1984, and one in 1999.

Shell is among a number of other companies that have other offshore permits, with that company in a consortium with OMV, PTTEP and Mitsui that will decide by January whether to drill their own well in the Great South Basin.

If they do decide to drill, they will be looking for resources sufficient to eventually develop a FLNG operation to export the gas overseas, Shell New Zealand’s chairman Rob Jager told Reuters. “If there is success in New Zealand, and the first part of that will be Anadarko drilling in Taranaki deepwater and the Canterbury Basin, that will create excitement – or otherwise – amongst both existing operators and new operators,” he said. Shell has applied for an initial prospecting permit for the New Caledonia basin, to the northwest of the North Island, in a joint venture with China’s CNOOC.

“It’s deepwater, it’s remote, so to get the cost to a reasonable place, you’d have to have something pretty material to make it work for LNG export,” said Neil Beveridge, senior analyst at Bernstein Research in Hong Kong. “You’re probably looking at a 10-15 Tcf resource base to really get an LNG development off the ground.”

Large finds have been made offshore New Zealand before – the country’s largest gas field is Maui in the Taranaki basin, which contains about 4 Tcf but was discovered in the 1970s.

Offshore