silence before the storm, page-17

What SLAMPOIL is effectively claiming, in a brazen display of blatantly fallacious logic, is:

1. Fractured oil reservoirs can be difficult to drill, can water out quickly, and can be difficult to quantify. CVN is an example.

2. Therefore, "No way [HW-3] is going to be economic."

Point 1 is true. Point 2 is a logical fallacy.

The ramper's equivalent would be to point to Ghawar and say "Ghawar is a carbonate reservoir and it's the biggest and best field in the world. Therefore HW-3 is going to be another Ghawar since it's also a carbonate reservoir!"

SLAMPOIL is correct that fractured reservoirs (carbonate or siliciclastic) ARE difficult targets and often fail, usually because the fractures aren't intersecting each other properly. You can get great initial flow rates but then the flow rate dies quickly.

But when they succeed, they succeed wildly. A great example is Palm Valley in central Australia. It has almost zero matrix porosity too, but a perfect network of orthogonal fractures led to the highest gas flow rates ever recorded in Australia. IIRC one well tested at 140 MMscfd or something equally ridiculous, and stabilised rates were high for many years.

We simply don't know whether HW-3 will be a CVN or a Palm Valley. It's certainly a lot less risky than most oil prospects though, and the results of HW-3 de-risked it further. For SLAMPOIL to claim that it's a lost cause is extremely disingenuous (and I suspect deliberately intended to draw a response, which it has done!).