Deep sea oil drilling has now ended in Aotearoa, except inTaranaki. However, Austrian oil giant OMV has announced that a programme to drill exploratory wells in the Taranaki Basin has been postponed immediately amid the COVID crisis, and it has no plans to bring a new rig to New Zealand. This follows the departure from Aotearoa of Petrobras, Anadarko, Equinor/Statoil, Chevron and others.

In November, nearly 30 protesters occupied OMV’s ‘henchboat’, the Skandi Atlantic, in the Port of Timaru for three days, delaying it from heading to a drill site. A week later, over a hundred people shut down OMV’s offices in New Plymouth for a further three days, before converting the building into the “Museum of Oil History.”A couple of months later, and the company was forced to admit it had sawed through its own drill shaft by accident, causing a halt to operations and millions of dollars in damage. Finally, OMV’s $80 million search for significant deposits of deep sea oil and gas in the Great South Basin came up empty handed.

For the last decade, Greenpeace, iwi, hapū, environmental groups, and individual New Zealanders have carried out a relentless campaign to put an end to deep sea oil exploration in New Zealand. In 2018, a ban on the issuing of all new offshore oil and gas exploration licences was put in place. But the Government did not revoke licences that had been issued before the ban. Now, the industry have been surrendering the permits of their own accord. NZ Oil & Gas is the last in a long line of companies to recently surrender its exploration permits.

Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner, Amanda Larsson says: “Now is the time to reimagine and rebuild the world we want so that when we come out the other end of this crisis, we are living in a more resilient Aotearoa. This starts with a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, and towards a society powered by clean, renewable energy.”

Image: Lisa Marshall