Crown Minerals petroleum business manager Clyde Bennett - in a letter sent to the Ngatoro partners Indo-Pacific, Greymouth and New Zealand Oil and Gas - says Greymouth has not submitted a proper development plan for Kaimiro-19.
This is the same accusation Greymouth leveled against Indo-Pacific, during their High Court fight earlier this year, regarding the nearby Goldie-1 well.
"Despite earlier attempts to have Greymouth submit an amended work program for the Kaimiro mining licence ... Greymouth has shown little interest in submitting such a revised program," says the Crown Minerals letter.
"It could therefore be said that Greymouth is acting in a manner that by your own evidence is not in accordance with good oilfield practice."
Crown Minerals requested Kaimiro-19 be shut-in until Greymouth had submitted a development plan.
Bennett today declined to discuss the letter, telling EnergyReview.Net that matters between permit holders were not for discussion through the media.
However, Indo-Pacific chief executive Dave Bennett was more forthcoming.
He said he had nothing to do with the Crown Minerals letter - "it came like a bolt out of the blue" - but was glad Greymouth was now being asked to submit a proper development plan or close the well.
Greymouth chief operating officer John Sturgess is reported as saying the company did have development plans in place for all producing Kaimiro pools, and that Crown Minerals had a copy of those plans. Greymouth had offered to present another draft plan but Crown Minerals had not yet taken up that offer.
The Kaimiro production licence had not been amended for additional producing pools, but this could be done if justified. Greymouth would shut-in the well if legally required to do so.
Bennett also said he believed drilling documents relating to Kaimiro-19, which was drilled earlier this year very close to the Kaimiro-Goldie boundary, had been destroyed. This was not illegal but it was very rare.
Kaimiro-19 had been drilled horizontally into the Goldie oil pool and that Greymouth had been flowing the well, utilising the oil and selling several million cubic feet of gas a day to Contact for use in its New Plymouth power station, Bennett believed.
He also disputed earlier comments by Sturgess that it might take up to 18 months to get Goldie-1 flowing at full production again, together with the unitisation of Kaimiro and Goldie, because of the auditing, consenting and unitisation processes required. "Unitisation should take no time at all, not months and months of protocol."
Greymouth has said it considers Kaimiro-19 to effectively be an extension of the Goldie pool, with producible reserves of about 5 bcf of gas.
Last month Justice Wild said Indo-Pacific subsidiary Ngatoro Energy Ltd was to be stripped of its operatorship of the Goldie oil field - which it sole-risked, drilled and subsequently brought into production in 2001 - because NEL had developed the field without consent and operated it in a less than optimal manner. The court also found that Indo-Pacific did not submit a development plan and should have discontinued production until Greymouth could purchase Goldie's by-product gas.
However, Justice Wild rejected the monetary claims of Greymouth Petroleum and confirmed NEL's entitlement to 100% of Goldie oil and gas net revenues until it had recovered $US11 million; being six times the $US1.85 million sole risk cost of the Goldie-1 discovery well. After this Indo-Pacific's share would be 40% of all revenues until it had received another $US5.5 million.
Greymouth is now seeking to take over as Goldie operator and to tie Goldie into its Kaimiro production facilities.
