Hours after oil exploration giant Anadarko began its deep-sea drilling programme off Taranaki's coast yesterday, Greenpeace lodged a High Court challenge seeking a judicial review of the decision to allow drilling.
Greenpeace ended its seven-day sea protest yesterday, with the yacht Vega departing the exclusion zone and heading back to the coast, while Anadarko began drilling its more than 3km hole in 1500m of water.
The ''urgent'' challenge yesterday to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decision could bring Anadarko's $US100 million ($NZ122 million) one-hole drilling programme to a halt.
A string of multiple court challenges against West Coast mine developer Bathurst Resources by Forest and Bird held up mine development by two years, before being resolved about a fortnight ago.
Noble Bob Douglas, which is due off Otago's coast early next year for a similar deep-sea one-hole, 70-day drilling programme north of Dunedin, started drilling, or ''spudding in'', before dawn yesterday.
Greenpeace lawyers claimed yesterday the EPA made an ''error in law' by allowing Anadarko to go ahead without looking at several key documents, including reports on oil-spill modelling and emergency plans to deal with an oil spill, according to the legal papers filed in the High Court at Wellington.
Greenpeace's chief policy adviser, Nathan Argent, said no-one had seen the documents on spill modelling and emergency plans.
''Apparently, Government ministers haven't seen these documents, so they don't know what's in them. And even the EPA, who gave the go-ahead to Anadarko, haven't seen these documents, so they don't know what's in them,'' he said in a statement.
Anadarko's New Zealand corporate affairs manager, Alan Seay, said when contacted he had no comment on the legal challenge other than ''to let that [legal] process unfold''.
''Our entire focus is to get on with the drilling,'' Mr Seay said when contacted in New Plymouth.
Greenpeace lawyers were asking for the matter to be ''allocated an urgent hearing date'' due to the ''national importance of the issue''.
Green Party energy spokesperson Gareth Hughes said Anadarko should cease drilling until the legal issues around their permission to drill were decided.
''It's hard to imagine that the EPA fulfilled its obligation to determine that Anadarko's application was complete, given it only saw summaries of Anadarko's oil-spill modelling and emergency response plan,'' Mr Hughes said in a statement.
He said under National's ''weak transitional provisions'', the EPA only had to consider the completeness of the environmental effects assessment, but not consider the actual environmental impact.
''The process to give Anadarko the permission to drill has been an utter shambles and makes a mockery of the Government's claims of `world-class rules' protecting the New Zealand environment,'' Mr Hughes said.
