New Zealand’s promising exploration scene strives for critical mass

New Zealand has a relatively small oil and gas industry built around the giant Maui Field and the downstream industries developed in tandem with it. With the depletion of this field approaching, there have been some encouraging new exploration successes, and emerging attention to long-neglected frontiers including a very extensive deep-water territory. How effectively will a small country distant from services and markets be able to attain the scale of investment required to realise the full potential of its endowment of petroleum resources? In this paper presented at the biennial New Zealand Petroleum Conference in February, J. Mac Beggs*, principal of GeoSphere, attempts to answer some of these questions in a summary of New Zealand’s hydrocarbons experience over the past two years.