The revival of exploration drilling offshore New Zealand is starting to pick up pace, with a joint venture consisting of Shell, OMV New Zealand and Mitsui E&P Australia under way with plans to drill a deepwater wildcat well, although not until 2016 at the earliest.
The probe is being lined up for PEP 50119 in the Great Southern Basin off New Zealand’s southeast coast, where Shell became operator in 2012. Shell New Zealand chairman, Rob Jager, said the company was confident of finding natural gas rather than oil.
“We believe there’s less than a 1% chance that there’s going to be oil,” he was reported as saying by Reuters. “It’s most likely going to be a gas export development.”
Shell, a pioneer of Floating LNG technology already being implemented for Australia’s western coast, is likely to follow suit with a similar but smaller-scale design if it has success with its exploration program, as reserves off New Zealand are not thought to be as large.
Shell also recently 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.
US explorer Anadarko Petroleum is already under way with its program to drill two deepwater wildcat wells offshore New Zealand this year in a joint venture with Australia’s Origin Energy Ltd. (see DI, 11 November 2013, page 4). The first probe is already drilling off the west coast of the North Island in the Taranaki Basin. The second is planned for the Canterbury Basin to the east of the South Island. Anadarko has already indicated it is looking for a find with a minimum size of 4 Tcf in order to have sufficient resources for a potential development in what remains one of the remotest offshore regions.
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