seller, page-13

looking very good Below are exerts from the AFR article where Greg Hancock predicts COE cash reserve will be $28M at year end after cost assuming the average oil price is $50 a barrel. Well oil price has been much higher than $50 that for sure.



The Cooper Basin has also been the springboard for Cooper Energy but now it is looking beyond Australia for its next round of growth.

EL & C Baillieu's Mr Morrow said: "The company has just said it is expanding offshore into waters off Cambodia and in the Mediterranean off Algiers. This is true adventure. Cooper has one good year of production from its existing fields before the going gets tough. The dice are rolling."

Cooper Energy executive director Greg Hancock agrees.

"Our reserves are still about 1 million barrels. This time last year, we had 1.1 million barrels and, having produced over 300,000 barrels, we are still at one million."

"This year, we still expect a very profitable year. Assuming oil prices of say an average of $US50 a barrel, we'd expect our cash reserves, after paying all our costs, to be around $28 million at year end," Mr Hancock said.

"The question for us is how we most sensibly spend the money that we are generating from the engine room of the Cooper Basin.

"We don't expect the Cooper Basin to deliver a company-making discovery for Cooper Energy. So we will be looking for projects and targets that will potentially deliver us to a market cap of hundreds of millions of dollars rather than where we are now. The strategy is beginning to come together.

"We have made over a dozen direct bids to governments and in some cases, we've been considerably over-bid by a market that appears to be operating outside reality."

Mr Hancock said shareholders could expect more investments in Africa and South-East Asia to complement the Tunisian and Cambodian exploration blocks already acquired. Shares in Cooper closed up 1.5 ? to 33 ? yesterday.