“We can't give up too much detail at this stage as there is a critical land sale occurring in New Zealand later this year, bid deadline is September 26, and there are few blocks up for bid offsetting us within the East Coast Basin. But I can tell you, we are extremely proud of the operational job we did in the drilling of our first deep test on the East Coast.
Ngapaeruru-1 was drilled without a hitch in about three weeks. We anticipated and encountered extreme overpressures. We encountered swelling mud stones and a few other nasty drilling obstacles that have been a nemesis of past drillers in this tricky basin. But again, our combination of Kiwi experience and North American technology allowed us to drill our well easily, collect all the critical data we intended to, and not have a single environmental health or safety issue.
The small minority of anti-fossil fuel opposition we had before we spudded the well barely had time to organize a protest before we were gone. The vast majority of our neighbors there, all of the regulatory bodies like local and regional councils couldn't believe what a professional operation it turned out to be. Drilling is new to these people. I think they were expecting wooden derricks and a spindle top blowout or something.
The results of this first well were encouraging, to say the least. In order to keep that over pressuring in check, we took no chances and used extremely heavy mud weights while drilling. Despite that, we went from over 1,000 meters of zero oil and gas shows through the over burden to instantaneous strong shows once we entered our target zone. Those shows continued unabated for 155 meters before they instantly disappeared to absolutely no shows again until TD, and that tells us a couple of things.
Number one, the seal looks to be working as no shows were seen above the zone. The zone itself definitely has hydrocarbons in it, but of course that was expected. We knew these source rocks were working from the quality and quantity of oil and gas seeps in this basin, but probably most important is that there seems to be permeability associated with the zone. That's the only way we would see the shows we did even given the high mud weights we were using.
We collected a lot of core, we shot Schlumberger's logs I've never even heard of before focusing on unconventional parameters and we collected live samples of liberated gas from the drilling mud itself. All of this data is now in various labs, mainly in New Zealand and Australia, where we're working with specialists from around the globe to interpret and plan the next step to be taken with the play, and in particular this wellbore.
What I can tell you is, we would definitely be completing this well, probably not for at least three to four months until we get all the data back from the labs and it's all interpreted, but Ngapaeruru-1 was not a red light, it was not an orange light, it is definitely a green light from what we have seen so far.“
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