Associate Energy Minister Harry Duynhoven today announced that the New Zealand government is to hold its first deepwater petroleum exploration permit bidding round over the previously unexplored deepwater Taranaki basin.
Crown Minerals has offered five blocks off the west coast of the North Island, covering a total of 42,000 sq km, for competitive bidding. A year will be allowed for marketing the blocks, with applications closing in September next year.
Crown Minerals staff will also be busy promoting this new acreage around the world in the next few weeks, presenting a series of seminars on deepwater Taranaki prospectivity to international petroleum companies in Houston, London, and Singapore.
These deepwater basin blocks will, hopefully, attract the interest of new companies such as Apache Corporation and Woodside Petroleum, as well existing players like Shell, Todd, Preussag Energie, OMV and Conoco.
This is because it is the deepwater Taranaki which holds the most promise for explorers who have to urgently find the big fields necessary to replace the once giant but now faltering Maui field, New Zealand's largest single energy resource.
The deepwater Taranaki Basin is adjacent to the highly productive Taranaki Basin, and extends down the continental shelf from about 200m of water depth into the head of the New Caledonia Basin, in about 1800m of water depth.
The blocks on offer will be allocated on the basis of a competitive work program system where the exploration company bidding the best program of work for a particular block is likely to be the successful applicant.
The bidding round follows the collection in 2001 of 6200 km of 2D seismic survey data over the deepwater area by Norwegian survey company TGS-NOPEC. Interpretation of the new seismic data by scientists from the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences has revealed an exciting new oil play - a Late Cretaceous delta approximately 100km long and 2km thick. This is in addition to play types already identified in the shallow waters of the Taranaki Basin.
Several lines of evidence suggest deepwater Taranaki should be oil prone, rather than gas prone. The shallow water and onshore Taranaki is now seen as more oil prone than previously thought, and the onshore overthrust zone running the length of Taranaki has recently yielded the Rimu-Kauri, Makino and Huinga oil finds.
There is also seismic stratigraphic evidence which suggests the deepwater Taranaki delta should be oil prone, as are other deltas around the world.
Most of New Zealand's sedimentary basins are highly prospective, with this country's Exclusive Economic Zone having an area of 4 million sqkm, about 15 times the area of its landmass. There were a number of sedimentary basins within this enormous offshore area.
Some oil industry analysts believe that 90% of the world's undiscovered offshore hydrocarbon reserves lie in ocean depths over 1000m, with many recent significant oil discoveries being made in deepwater fields such as in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coasts of West Africa and Brazil.
The opening of a deepwater oil exploration area created some exciting new possibilities for the petroleum industry in New Zealand, but high-technology companies, with large resources, were needed to discover and develop any oil that was found, Mr Duynhoven concluded.
