L&M Petroleum is using brokers Intersuisse Corporate for the ASX listing – its main listing – and McDouall Stuart for the secondary NZX lsting.

“I got a call last night from InterSuisse to say that ASIC [Australian Securities and Investments Commission] had fully cleared the proposed IPO on the ASX,” McDouall Stuart Securities executive director Chris Stone told PetroleumNews.net this morning.

L&M is due to list on the ASX on December 31, but Stone said it could be on the NZX within two weeks.

Stone said L&M Petroleum planned to use the $A20 million raised from the IPO to help fund its proposed South Island exploration campaign from next year.

“They are planning a pretty aggressive campaign, 11 wells in two years, but they are also looking at some very large structures,” he said.

Stone said L&M Petroleum – headed by former Fletcher Challenge Energy and Mighty River Power executive John Bay – was taking a different but valid approach to estimating what its onshore South Island acreage could contain.

“The onshore structures have been mapped with a degree of confidence and have the cumulative potential to hold up to the equivalent of 400 million barrels of oil,” he said.

“That’s a technically valid potential of the oil and gas-in-place using reasonable assumptions.”

Stone said there was some geological evidence that the southern part of the South Island had eons ago been near or adjacent to the Taranaki Basin and could contain similar types of source rocks as those seen in Taranaki, New Zealand’s only commercial oil and gas region.

“Southland could prove to be a very exciting exploration province,” he said.

In June, L&M Petroleum announced it had recovered small quantities of gas and traces of oil from the target Beaumont Formation reservoir sands at its initial Sharpridge Creek-1 well.

It said the results, together with active oil and gas seeps elsewhere in licence PEP 38226, confirmed the existence of an active petroleum system in the Waiau Basin with good reservoir quality sandstone.

L&M plans to spud its second Beaumont Formation, in the Eastern Bush Prospect, next March or April, in conjunction with government-owned MRP.

L&M Petroleum has four onshore permits covering nearly all of the Te Anau and Waiau Basins, and a 4450 square kilometre offshore permit covering the Waitutu and Solander Basins.

It is understood the IPO will be fully underwritten with strong levels of demand and that the formal “offer open” period will be extremely short.

Other parts of the L&M Group hold several coal seam methane and lignite (brown coal) exploration permits in the South Island.