Aussie listed company Bounty Oil and Gas is bringing the Polar Duke to New Zealand after it finishes a survey in Offshore Sydney Basin licence PEP 11.
Company exploration manager Laurence Roe told EnergyReview.Net from Perth that the Duke should finish the Sydney Basin work early next week.
"We expect to commence work in PEP 38215 in about two weeks and the job should take around three weeks or so. We expect the vessel to sail directly to Invercargill and then out for our program."
The Polar Dike has visited New Zealand several times before, the most recent being last summer, shooting over 2000km of seismic in three offshore Taranaki licences for two consortia.
Bounty Oil is to be free-carried through the acquisition of the PEP 38215 seismic, through a farmout to British company Electro Silica Plc, which will earn a 25% interest by funding the seismic as well as an option to drill an exploration well to earn a further 50%.
Bounty's latest quarterly report says reprocessing and reinterpretation of over 6200km of seismic have confirmed the presence of a number of large untested structures in PEP 38215. This has also allowed Bounty to assign probable recoverable reserves of 0.9 tcf and possible recoverable reserves of 2.2 tcf of gas in the Toroa structure, which was drilled by Hunt International Petroleum in 1976.
Bounty also says Methanex New Zealand has supplied an Expression of Interest indicating that they would seriously consider entering into a long-term gas contract if sufficient gas reserves could be proven and delivered under agreeable commercial terms.
Methanex NZ is desperate to find enough economically-priced gas to keep its Taranaki plants operating and supplying methanol into the growing Asia-Pacific region. It has secured enough gas to produce 0.5-1.0 million tonnes in 2004, but is virtually existing year-by-year.
Given the remoteness of the Great South Basin and the almost complete lack of infrastructure, it would take a mega-tcf find and very attractive pricing terms to interest Methanex. It could, however disassemble its modular Motunui plant and ship it to the South Island for re-assembly in a main centre such as Christchurch, Dunedin or even Invercargill.
