elephant country?, page-41

CB,

They are two completely different factors. COS is the probability of encountering a successful petroleum trap, requiring source, migration, reservoir, trap and seal. It has nothing to do with the size of the deposit if the COS comes off.

If your COS comes off positive, then you start looking at the size of the deposit. After that, you start looking at recovery factors.

So in this case, the unrisked mean is 35MMbbls OIP which gets risked to 8MMbbls by the 22% COS.

Then you assume 30% (or however much) recovery, so you get 2.4MMbbls. If you were going to make an investment decision, this is the figure you would use.

However, in this case, the COS has been significantly de-risked because we have, apparently, a good reservoir, good trap, good seal, good source and proof of migration. If we get proof of flows to surface, you can pretty much forget the COS altogether and assume it's 100%, ie the unrisked mean becomes the risked mean.

Then it just depends where in the OIP scale we are, from P1 to P99. There's evidence for optimism (from the 88m oil column) that we might even beat the mean OIP.

So things are looking pretty good IMO. It all hinges on the flow test, which will make or break this well.