Push for petroleum research centre

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

Geologists are floating the idea of a national petroleum research centre to boost the search for natural gas to replace the Maui field.

The petroleum research leader at the state-owned Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, Dr Peter King, wants to attract state and corporate backers to double the $5 million the Government puts into oil and gas research.

The extra money would pay for seismic surveys and prospecting designed to entice oil companies to New Zealand by identifying likely drilling prospects.

"That is currently outside our mandate," Dr King said.

He said most of New Zealand was still under-explored for oil and gas, and there was still potential for discoveries even in the most developed province, Taranaki.

Maui gas is due to run out in 2007, and so far only two smaller fields have been found to partially replace it in the next few years.

"Exploration is a long lead-time business.

"Once a discovery is made there is quite a long time before the field is delineated and volumes of resources are calculated, and then you have to do the physical drilling of the wells and build the pipelines and so on," Dr King said.

"It's important, because of those lead times, to have new discoveries in the next two to three years to take over from Maui."

Institute scientists floated the idea at a national petroleum conference last month, but so far there have been no commitments from the industry to help fund the project.

Dr Mac Beggs of Wellington's GeoSphere Exploration said oil exploration was out of favour in world investment markets despite high oil prices.

"The market is a lot more cold-blooded about them [discoveries] than it was in the 1980s when the oil companies were highly profitable," he said.

However, local power companies Contact and Mighty River Power announced last month that they were each putting $20 million into a proposed $80 million fund for oil and gas exploration.