Crown Minerals return from encouraging global promotional trip

Crown Minerals petroleum manager Mark Aliprantis and chief geologist Dr Richard Cook returned last week from the tour that took in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Austria, France, Italy and Brazil - bases for some of the world's largest petroleum explorers.

The purpose of the trip was the ongoing promotion of New Zealand as a petroleum exploration destination and in particular the upcoming new blocks being offered in the deeper water Northland and Raukumara Basin blocks offers. 

Aliprantis says that they were very well received and New Zealand ranks in the top five of new frontier regions for exploration. "Despite the current prevailing economic situation, the oil companies that we saw were all proactively looking at new exploration opportunities and are keen to get into positions now so as to take advantage of them in the near-term," he says. "New Zealand is now featuring in the top handful of areas of interest which is very encouraging."

Data packs for the two basins had already been sent to the majors from seismic data acquisition programmes funded by the previous government. GNS Science also contributed some technical reports around the seismic and Aliprantis and Cook gave detailed technical presentations. 

The companies visited included amongst others, StatoilHydro, Total S.A., Maersk, ENI, Petrobras and OMV. 

Aliprantis says that this type of promotional tour is done on a semi-regular basis with Crown Minerals visiting Europe some two years ago promoting the Great South Basin. Previous trips have been made to North America and South East Asia and the companies visited are matched to the nature of the acreage and the opportunity. 

More recently the Taranaki onshore blocks offer was promoted in Australia but the more challenging and expensive deepwater exploration requires a different level of scale and expertise. Such is the nature of the Northland and Raukumara Basins.

"Experience and expertise in frontier deeper water basins is what we have targeted," says Aliprantis.

In terms of progress Aliprantis says some of the companies have already gone some way down evaluating the technical data while other companies were about to start.

Signs of success won't become evident until the first offer closes in January 2010 and most of the bids won't arrive until close to the closing date.

On overcoming the challenges of luring overseas explorers to New Zealand, Aliprantis points to the country's large offshore acreage, the presence of OMV and ExxonMobil, New Zealand's relative under-prospected nature and the government's seismic acquisition programmes.

"They are already interested because they can see the likes of OMV and ExxonMobil exploring New Zealand and they see this as a reason to be exploring New Zealand," he says. "The world is becoming an increasingly smaller place, and New Zealand is a place where there is a lot of very under-explored areas and has the potential to contain very large volumes of oil and gas. They see it as compelling to look at."

He says that while deepwater exploration is more difficult it is becoming more commercial and the competition from explorers is increasing.

Oil on the rise again

In encouraging signs for the sector, the oil price has enjoyed a four month surge closing today at around USD $68 per barrel, up from lows of $40 experienced earlier this year.

The current government recently announced further funding for seismic data acquisition.

Source: Matt Freeman www.energynews.co.nz