from iress: dj newswire on shale gas, page-3

Gasbag,

Your on the mark again, this is the best posting I have seen on this thread for a while...

If the PEL218 recoverable gas is anything like they think it is this is going to be huge for Beach..As Reg said after the flow test from Holdfast there could be between 60-120 tcf of gas in place with gas recoverable being between 15-30% we could be looking at Gas Recoverable of greater than 20 tcf, this is huge and will multiple the share price if they can extract this at a reasonable cost!!

Beach is the furthest along with Shale gas in Australia and besides Santos is probably one of the larger companies in the shale gas space, even though with ~1 billion market cap is not large by any means.

I see a few options for Beach at this stage, they will be taken over outright (I would like to see a serious premium to the current share price for this to happen > $4 per share)or they can partner with a major Oil/gas company (who can bring some serious capital), to mop up some of the smaller players in the cooper to consolidate there shale gas position and give them economies of scale in the cooper basin (they better be quick though) and fast track there pilot gas program. But who knows what will happen, we will find out soon enough. Personally I would prefer a takeover in the earlier stages, instead of awaiting for a couple of years for them to unlock the value.