Private company Green Gate – which earlier this year clashed with former partner Canadian listed junior TAG Oil over plans to drill the Kate-1 well in onshore Canterbury licence PEP 38260 – has applied for a Great South Basin exploration permit.
It applied under the priority in time (PIT) provisions of the Crown Minerals Petroleum Regime for a licence covering 11,400 square kilometres over the western margin of the GSB and a deepwater extension of the Solander Basin, west of Stewart Island.
Widespread Energy, which took a 10% stake in Green Gate last May, has been granted licence PEP 38526 covering an area of 287.8 sq.km of the Kotuku area north of Lake Brunner on the West Coast of the South Island.
Wellington-based GeoSphere acts as consultant to both companies.
GeoSphere managing director Mac Beggs told PetroleumNews.net that Green Gate believed the Great South Basin block was prospective for oil.
“The work program to be conducted is broadly similar to work we have conducted in other offshore projects, consistent with standard global exploration methods and with the requirements of New Zealand's exploration regime,” he said.
If successful with its GSB application, Green Gate will join operators ExxonMobil, Austrian giant OMV and Greymouth Petroleum in exploring one of the harshest and highest risk basins in New Zealand.
Green Gate managing director Stacey Radford told PNN last month that his company and Sydney-based explorer Gas2Grid were still planning to drill Kate-1 later this year to test an anticlinal structure about 50km north of Christchurch.
The primary target will be sandstone reservoirs in the Late Cretaceous Broken River formation coal measures. The estimated potential of the Broken River formation is about 25 million barrels of oil in place.
An oil seep was uncovered during geotechnical works on the flank of the Kate anticline in 2003, while and soil gas surveys have confirmed the presence of thermogenic hydrocarbons.
Radford said Green Gate was also reviewing the seismic data acquired last May by the CGG Veritas vessel Duke over the offshore parts of licences PEP 38260 and 263.
“We have also discussed with ADA [Australian Drilling Associates] our options to drill an offshore well in the upcoming program they are administering at present for the 2008-09 season,” he said.
ADA has options on five slots for the jack-up Ensco Rig 56 once it has finished drilling offshore Pohokura development wells next year.
Green Gate was also completing the review of seismic data for its onshore Murchison, South Island licence PEP 38253, Radford said.
Widespread – which listed on the New Zealand Alternative Market (NZAX) of the New Zealand bourse last November – said prolific oil seeps at Kotuku, largely within PEP 38526, attested to the potential of the permit.
The company said GeoSphere had been compiling a comprehensive database of the results of previous exploration in the area, including well records and seismic lines, and would be reprocessing selected seismic data in the coming months.
The results would be used to compile an inventory of leads and prospects that might be subject to further geophysical surveys and, in due course, to exploration drilling.
Widespread said the West Coast of the South Island had the right geological ingredients for commercially significant as-yet undiscovered oil and gas resources.
