The Auckland-headquartered company yesterday afternoon said Crown Minerals had awarded it the 466 square kilometre licence PEP 38775 – a block immediately to the north and east of Pohokura.

Greymouth also said PEP 38775 was close to its onshore Turangi gas-condensate field that, together with the adjacent Ohanga area, contains proven and probable (2P) reserves of 154 petajoules of gas and 5.1 million barrels of condensate.

Company chief operating officer John Sturgess said Greymouth would acquire 200km of 2D marine seismic and 20km of 2D transition zone seismic in PEP 38775, ahead of planned well drilling operations during 2009, but he did not know when Greymouth would begin the seismic survey.

Greymouth believed the Eocene-aged Kapuni group coastal sands, which formed the producing reservoirs in both the offshore Maui and Pohokura gas fields, to also exist within PEP 38775, Sturgess said. Greymouth has successfully exploited these Eocene sands at Turangi.

Meanwhile, Greymouth’s 2007 exploration program has started, with the Bonus Drilling Rig 2 drilling the first well – essentially a sidetrack of the Ngatoro-10 well in the southwestern lobe of the small onshore Taranaki Ngatoro oil field.