The near-new rig – weighing about 16,000 tonnes and standing 157m high and 63m wide – and the Offshore Heavy Transport vessel spent several hours off Port Taranaki, New Plymouth, yesterday for customs and immigration clearances before heading south to Admiralty Bay in the Marlborough Sounds.

The Willift Falcon will wait for settled weather before offloading the rig, which will then be towed to the Kupe field to install the wellhead platform jacket, one of the largest structural components for the project’s offshore platform, situated 30km off south Taranaki.

The 550-tonne jacket – fabricated by Thai Nippon Steel's fabrication yards in Thailand – has been sitting in the port harbour since early August awaiting the arrival of the rig, which has been drilling off Vietnam.

Origin Energy’s Kupe project director Peter Ashford said once the rig had installed the jacket, it would then begin drilling Kupe’s three production wells and, afterwards, install the topsides on the jacket.

The Ensco 107 is to drill three development wells in the central field area (CFA) of the Kupe licence, plus at least the Momoho-1 exploration well, before moving further south to drill the scheduled five oil development wells, plus three water injection wells, for the Maari partners headed by operator Austrian firm OMV.

The arrival of the rig also means the New Zealand oil and gas industry now has three offshore rigs working simultaneously – which has never happened in the country before.

The smaller jack-up Ensco 56 is midway through drilling the six offshore Pohokura development wells off the north Taranaki coast for operator Shell Exploration NZ and its partners, while the semi-submersible Ocean Patriot is drilling the Kopuwai-1 wildcat well for operator Australian Worldwide Exploration and its PEP 38482 partners.

The Kupe project is expected to be completed by mid-2009 and will provide New Zealand with about 254 petajoules of gas, 1.1 million tonnes of LPG and 14.7 million barrels of condensate.

In other news, Origin is aiming to raise $NZ200 million from New Zealand investors through the issue of preference shares, with the offer closing last Friday. Funds raised will be used to repay bank debt relating to Origin’s 51.4% shareholding in integrated listed company Contact Energy.

The Kupe partners are operator Origin (50%), Genesis Energy (31%), New Zealand Oil & Gas (15%), and Mitsui E&P NZ (4%).