Wellington-headquartered New Zealand Oil & Gas, which has a 12.5% stake in the project, said last Friday afternoon that the tanker British Merlin was loading crude oil from the Tui floating production, storage and offloading vessel Umuroa that day, taking NZOG’s sales past the 1MMbbl mark and total sales to date to more than 8MMbbl mark.

Production from the Tui, Amokura and Pateke oil pools began last July 30 and has averaged over 40,000bbl per day, with oil shipped by tanker to refineries in Australia and South-East Asia.

Tui oil is sweet light crude that is benchmarked against the Tapis blend.

NZOG said the average net price it had received since the start of production was about $US89 ($A99) per barrel.

Estimated production for the June 2007-08 financial year is expected to exceed 12MMbbl from the fields that have upgraded 2P reserves of 41.7MMbbl.

The Tui partners are operator AWE (42.5%), Mitsui E&P NZ (35%), NZOG (12.5%) and Pan Pacific Petroleum (10%).