Sydney-headquartered AWE and partners won the 10,210 square kilometre permit in December 2003 as part of that year's Deepwater Taranaki Blocks Offer.
They have now surrendered 2030sq.km - part of the western portion of the original permit - but have retained shallower acreage that includes the Hector South and Mataku South leads.
"We dropped the deepest water stuff and are doing the post drill work at the moment. We are evaluating a whole lot of information and I do not know what the outcome of that will be," AWE New Zealand exploration manager Eric Matthews told PetroleumNews.net.
"However, we have committed time on the semi-submersible Kan Tan IV in late 2009 and that could be in Australia or New Zealand."
Matthews said AWE held interests in some Bass Basin and Offshore Otway Basin leases - though it did not operate those permits - so it would be up to those operators to decide whether to use the Kan Tan IV or not.
But if the rig came to Taranaki waters, where AWE is the dominant acreage holder/operator, then likely wells drilled in the third quarter of 2009 would include a fifth development well, Tui-4H, for the Tui Area oilfield and wells at Hector South, Hoki (PEP 38401) or Toke (PEP 38499), he added.
"We shot seismic over Toke and Hoki in mid 2007 and are right in the middle of analysing that data right now."
The semi-submersible Ocean Patriot rig plugged and abandoned Hector-1 in PEP 38483 last August after failing to encounter significant hydrocarbon shows in any of the well's three main target zones.
According to Crown Minerals, work program obligations for PEP 38483 still include committing to drill, within the next eight months, an appraisal well to Hector-1.
Matthews told PNN that was still AWE's intention. It would be working all year to develop an ongoing program for the licence.
Crown Minerals says the permit's first term expires next December and AWE will then either commit to further drilling or surrender half the licence.
Hector-1 was the first in a four-well exploration campaign drilled by different AWE-led consortiums off Taranaki last year.
The other non-commercial wells were Taranui-1 (an appraisal well in the Tui mining licence PMP 38158), West Cape-1 (PEP 38481) and Kopuwai-1 (PEP 38482).
Last month Matthews told the 2008 New Zealand Petroleum Conference that there were no secrets to AWE's strategy for offshore Taranaki.
"Our strategy is to explore more in and around our Tui Area mining permit and to find more oil on the Western Platform that we believe is an oil play, not a gas play," he said.
The PEP 38483 partners are operator AWE (44.317%), New Zealand Oil & Gas (through its subsidiary Stewart Petroleum, 18.864%), Mitsui E&P New Zealand (22.728%), and Pan Pacific Petroleum (through its subsidiary WM Holdings (14.091%).
