flavor of the month, page-7

doc70,

This project has not picked the wrong operator!!!!!
What has happen over the last few weeks is like the story of the "sky is falling".
Remember ... an acorn hit a chook on the head and she ran around screaming that the sky was falling and eventually all the animals in the farmyard believed it to be true.

We on hot copper have been faced with rubbish posted here for quite some time and it has gained its own momentum and has spooked most.
Misinformation, misinterpretation and rubbish has been posted and repeated ad nauseum. This has eroded confidence in the stock and in the minds of some shareholders.
This stock had up to 2500 readers at times and that has the effect of spreading sentiment quickly.
The damage has been done by the posters here with their comments and they have misdirected the blame to management.
This stock is held by retail investors, some 5000 of them.
With the number reading the thread with the misinformation repeated on and on .... well the rest is now history.

The information from the company, that has been announced to the ASX has been released as soon as practical and any mistakes/errors have been corrected as soon as they have been notified.
Too many are trying to micromanage what is/has been happening.

From the very start this has been a proof of concept well.
The concepts are:-
1. That the shale contains sufficient hydrocarbons to be a gas/Oil producer.
2. That the shale was brittle enough to respond to hydraulic fraccing and to flow.

So far the well has been 100% successful, with hydrocarbons to surface from every level fracced.
The job now is to measure the flow rates to be able to establish contingent resource estimates and to be able to calculate the production and the design of horizontal drilling and fraccing of the production wells.

The company never announced that this was ever expected to be a commercial production well.
It was the belief of the American specialists who were confident that the HCSS would turn out to be commercial which they discussed at the AGM in Nov 2011 after they had analysed the cores from the vertical drill.
It was not the company who claimed this, but all in the company hoped like hell that this was going to be the outcome.

The criticisms of management have been made by people who have not got off their shiny backsides and gone to have a look at what is being done.
The management of the drill/fraccing program by our team, not the contractors, was first rate. To have been organised enough and flexible enough to have been able to adjust to the timetable variations due to cancellations of other programmed wells showed great knowledge and expertise.
We never lost any time nor were we up for any standby charges as a result of not being ready or able to cope.
We did not lose the drill to anywhere else either.

The Haliburton team was released from the site because we could not afford to have them on standby rates whilst the layers were cleaning up. Therefore we had to get other drill rigs to do the required work. That takes time.
We are not in America where there is an excess of drilling capacity. If one contractor over there does the wrong thing he can be replaced by morning with another team(maybe a slight exageration) but not here, especially when you are attempting to do work which most people in Australia had not heard of 3 or 4 years ago, and the skills to do the work are not in your face.

Some critised the christmas break.
Our team were exhausted. They needed to recharge their batteries. If those who were shooting their mouths off had bothered to attend the AGM and met the team they would have seen for themselves. They would also have seen how excited they were with the results which they had achieved at that time.
The team is small and is working their butts off to bring this home, for all our benefits.

The team did not all go to the bahamas for the break. Work was still being done. Measuring pressures, testing and ordering materials etc. small but important stuff.

Restarting the operation has taken longer than the team would have hoped, but it is not up to us to micromanage the day to day activities of the team. We are not on the ground there and we do not know what they have had to contend with to get things up and going.
To want to be told through an asx announcement every time one of the operators has a toilet stop is ridiculous.
It is also wrong to expect the release of anything other than the results of the testing at this point in time.
If you want interpretation and blue sky massaging of your psyche, then you need to talk to an investment house/advisor whose job it is to interpret the results or attend the Sydney Oil and Gas conference on the 5th and 6th of March.

I haven't posted here for a while and reading a lot of what has been written has been so infuriating that I was concerned that this thread may have been at risk of being closed down like EGO .....

This is a good stock, well managed and with more potential than many, the choice is yours as to whether or not you invest with it .... there are some however whom I hope are so disillusioned that they sell their holding and refrain from returning and others who don't have a holding whom I hope don't buy.