UPDATE 1-New Britain pads estates with $44 mln PNG buy

(Adds details, shares)

LONDON, May 16 (Reuters) - New Britain Palm Oil (NBPO.L: Quote, Profile, Research) offered on Friday to buy the rest of the shares in a Papua New Guinea-listed planter it partly owns for $44 million in cash, accelerating plans to double its estate size.

New Britain, which already owns a fifth of Ramu Agri-Industries Ltd, holds long-term leases on about 30,000 hectares of land in the Ramu Valley in Papua New Guinea.

With 4,500 hectares already planted and another 16,000 hectares potentially plantable, the acquisition will eventually boost New Britain's acreage by around 50 percent.

Around 10,000 hectares of the Ramu land will be used for its minority cattle business or is otherwise protected land.

The company, whose shares were up 2 percent to 564.5 pence at 0754 GMT, has said it wants to double its current estate size of 45,000 hectares by 2015.

Around a third of New Britain's $125 million cash pile will be used to pay for Ramu, leaving the company still debt-free and with "plenty of firepower" for more acquisitions, the company said.

Papua New Guinea's largest palm oil producer, the company has said additional estates could come from acquisitions in Malaysia and Indonesia, the world's two top producers of the edible oil. (Reporting by Hsu Chuang Khoo; Editing by Quentin Bryar)