Waitangi Hill, East Coast Basin Petroleum Exploration Permit 38348

100% Interest: 530,000 acres
Waitangi Hill has the potential to return early cash flow from shallow oil development, as well as providing the first modern data on the underlying Waipawa Black Shale and Whangai Shale Formation source rocks, an unconventional fractured oil-shale opportunity.

Drilling in the early part of last century reported ongoing production of high quality (50 degree API) crude oil from a depth of approximately 200m (650 ft). During recent fieldwork, this same high quality live oil was observed with associated gas to the surface in this old well bore. This oil was sampled and analyzed, and results indicate oil generation is actively occurring from the underlying Whangai Shale Formation, which is both a high quality source-rock and unconventional reservoir target.

Drilling of up to three 200m (650ft) continuously cored test wells will be completed in early 2010 in order to gather critical data in and around the Waitangi-1 oil discovery, with the data from these wells providing critical information for assessing TAG Oil's exploration and development strategy for the Waitangi Hill discoveries.