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New Zealand Oil & Gas Ltd is today celebrating the bringing of its Tui oil field off the Taranaki coast into production.
The company said the first oil flowed from the field overnight. This was three years after Tui was discovered.
Tui is 50km offshore in the Taranaki Basin and has an estimated 27.9 million barrels of oil.
The intention is to ramp production up to 50,000 barrels of oil a day.
NZOG owns 12.5 per cent share of the development, giving the company 3.5 million barrels of oil over the project life, 30 per cent of which will be recovered in the next 12 months. The first three shipments of oil have already been sold, benchmarked against the Tapis crude oil price.
The company needs the revenue from the field as it has three projects on the go, Tui and Kupe in Taranaki and the Pike River coal mine on the West Coast.
"The oil revenues will give us a solid platform to pursue our growth strategy," chief executive David Salisbury said.
- NZPA
