New Zealand's scientific institutions have been restructured so as to be more responsive to the needs of the economy. Exploration for and development of oil and gas resources depend heavily on the geological sciences. In New Zealand, these activities are favoured by a comprehensive, open-file database of the results of previous work, and by a historically publicly funded, in-depth knowledge base of the extensive sedimentary basins. This expertise is now only partially funded by government research contracts, and increasingly undertakes contract work in a range of scientific services to the upstream petroleum sector, both in New Zealand and overseas. By aligning government-funded research programmes with the industry's knowledge needs, there is maximum advantage in improving the understanding of the occurrence of oil and gas resources. A Crown Research Institute can serve as an interface between advances in fundamental geological sciences, and the practical needs of the industry. Current publicly funded programmes of the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences include a series of regional basin studies, nearing completion; and multi-disciplinary team studies related to the various elements of the petroleum systems of New Zealand: source rocks and their maturation, migration and entrapment as a function of basin structure and tectonics, and the distribution and configuration of reservoir systems.
