Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2025 now law

This legislation makes changes to the Crown Minerals Act 1991 as part of a wider minerals plan designed to meet New Zealand’s energy security challenges and to promote economic opportunities, including:

• removing the ban on new oil and gas exploration beyond onshore Taranaki and allowing for new methods to allocate petroleum permits, signalling the Government’s intent to reinvigorate investment in petroleum exploration
• amendments to the decommissioning regime to better balance regulatory burden and risk, through new rules to trailing liability and decommissioning obligations
• changing the purpose of the Act from ‘manage’ to ‘promote’ and replacing the Minister’s functions with “attract permit applications”
• providing greater flexibility under the existing exemption and deferral powers for decommissioning to consider exemptions for either the whole or parts of particular items of infrastructure
• providing greater flexibility and clarity around what types of financial securities may be accepted
• extending the confidentiality period for speculative prospectors who were impacted by the petroleum exploration ban; and
• introducing a new Tier 3 permit category for small-scale, non-commercial gold mining.

The Crown Minerals Amendment Act 2025 – New Zealand Legislation

Most of the changes to the Act will take place immediately, while others will require staged implementation and secondary legislation to be in place.

More information is available on the New Zealand Petroleum & Minerals website.

Crown Minerals Act law changes