New Data Resource to Help in the Search for Oil And Gas

New Data Resource to Help in the Search for Oil And Gas

Geologists will produce a series of freely available digital maps and a comprehensive database over the next four years to help exploration companies pinpoint prospective areas to explore for oil and gas in New Zealand’s offshore territory.

The result will be an extensive body of information showing the current geological understanding of New Zealand’s 18 mostly offshore petroleum basins. It will be the first time that such a wealth of knowledge has been available in a standardised format in one place.

The four-year project, led by GNS Science, has won funding of $500,000-a-year in the latest MBIE funding round, announced today by Science and Innovation Minister Steven Joyce.

The project will bring together about six decades of existing information, augmented by new data, on potential subsurface habitats where petroleum is likely to have accumulated.

Project leader and petroleum geologist Kyle Bland, of GNS Science, said most of New Zealand’s sedimentary basins were largely unexplored for petroleum and a large discovery anywhere would dramatically improve New Zealand’s economic fortunes.

“The full extent of our natural petroleum endowment is unknown. It resides deep below the surface and finding it is complex, expensive, and time consuming,” Dr Bland said.

The project’s main output will be a workstation-ready ‘digital atlas’ made up of multiple layers of information such as sediment thickness, reservoir architecture, and source rock distribution in Geographic Information System format.

Project milestones will be released in stages through delivery tools such as GNS Science’s Petroleum Basin Explorer web portal and as data packs.

“Our aim is to encourage rapid industry uptake of this information. Users will be able to quickly focus on areas of high prospectivity while being aware of other areas where data is scarce.

“The data will help greatly in evaluating petroleum prospectivity within and between basins right across New Zealand’s offshore territory.”

The main end users would be companies that are evaluating petroleum prospects globally, companies that are new to New Zealand, companies who are already here and looking for new opportunities, and government agencies that administer permit allocations.

Dr Bland anticipated that, as a result of the new information, exploration activity would increase in New Zealand, and that the chances of a major discovery would also rise.

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