Banister, who is also technical vice president for the Asia-Pacific region, said Shell was committed to maximising value from its existing assets, the offshore Taranaki Pohokura and Maui fields and the onshore Taranaki Kapuni field.
But in terms of overall prospectivity, New Zealand did not rank highly, he said.
“We drill big cats, fields with a minimum of 100 million barrels equivalent,” Banister told the Auckland conference. “That’s a pretty high standard and we do not see many big cats in New Zealand.”
He confirmed that Shell was interested in the Great South Basin, which lies south and southeast of the South Island.
“The Great South Basin is an opportunity that plays to Shell’s strengths, our scale and the technologies we are using or developing,” he said.
Crown Minerals closes the 40-block GSB blocks offer at the end of March. Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, ENI and others have already expressed interest in the region that Crown Minerals believes could hold several million barrel-plus oil fields or multi-trillion cubic feet gas fields.
But Banister would not comment on whether the company would bid for any blocks in that frontier region.
However, he was more forthcoming in discussing Shell’s existing New Zealand assets, and said the company had already started work on maximising recovery from the mature Maui and Kapuni gas fields.
STOS, which operates the Maui field for the Maui partners Shell Exploration New Zealand, Todd Energy and Austrian firm OMV, had already shot 3D and 4D seismic over the Maui field. It had also recently applied for a southeast extension to the Maui mining licence.
“One of the keys to maximising assets is to see what additional activity may be possible in a field. Although we do not know what this [Maui extension] might mean, it’s only natural for us to be seeing what we can do with Maui,” he told PetroleumNews.net.
The Maui partners had also successfully drilled two wells into the Ihi prospect, using rotary steerables, finding more recoverable reserves and prolonging the life of Maui to 2014.
Banister said Shell was also looking at various tight gas technologies, including fraccing and multi-laterals, to help recover more gas and condensate from the Kapuni field that Shell and Todd Energy jointly own and have been producing from since 1969.
He also said the $NZ1 billion Pohokura gas-condensate project was a showcase development for Shell EP International.
It featured the longest well yet drilled in New Zealand, over 7km total length, and was a technologically “smart” field, with an unmanned platform remotely operated from the STOS office in nearby New Plymouth.
The New Plymouth-based well engineering team was also the top team in the world for Shell last year.
“Pohokura is a living example of technology in action,” Banister said.
Shell last year took over from STOS as operator of the Pohokura project, saying it believed it could extract more value from the development if operator.
Shell also believed the same about Maui, but the High Court sided with Todd Energy’s argument that STOS should remain operator for the life of the field.
Banister told PNN that Shell’s legal appeal against last year’s High Court decision was due to be heard by the Court of Appeal in late April.
