East Coast Basin, New Zealand

David Francis pours live oil generated from the Whangai Shale in the historical Waitangi-1 well-bore.

Conventional and Unconventional Exploration Approach
Trans-Orient controls 100% interest in approximately 2.2 million acres representing the most significant position in the onshore area of the East Coast Basin. Geotechnical work to date has identified a number of significant, multi-target, conventional and unconventional prospects at depths between 250 and 2000 meters.

Conventional reservoir targets include Miocene-aged turbidite sandstones with porosities up to 20% or more. At least 50 conventional prospects and leads have been identified across the acreage with a number of large prospects now drill-ready. Some of the more prominent, high-impact targets include the Boar Hill, Pauariki, KawaKawa, and the Arakihi Anticline prospects.

Sproule International Ltd. estimates the undiscovered conventional resource potential in Trans-Orient's permits to be in excess of 1.7 billion barrels. In addition, the Waitangi-1 (1912) historical oil discovery, which still produces oil to surface, can rapidly and cost-effectively proceed to development over this large area. Waitangi Hill has conventional targets between 250m-2000m and is also a potential unconventional target in the fractured shale source rocks.

Widespread Unconventional Frontier
Unconventional prospects are widespread across the acreage and exist in the late Cretaceous to Paleocene-aged Waipawa Black Shale and Whangai Shale source rock formations. Recent field and subsurface core studies have confirmed these world-class source rocks are not only rich in Total Organic Carbon (TOC%), they are also heavily fractured in many locations, which is one key factor in successful fractured oil shale production.

Basin Background
The East Coast Basin is a Cretaceous-Cenozoic fore-arc basin situated across the Australian-Pacific plate margin. Basins of this type can be prolific producers of oil and gas, as in Indonesia, California and other active plate margins worldwide. There are very few wells drilled in the East Coast Basin (one well per 800,000 acres), but the majority of these had significant oil and gas shows, including two of the offshore wells. Two onshore gas discoveries, with flow rates of up to 12 million cubic feet gas per day, are now under appraisal by Energy Corporation of America in the neighboring acreage.