cooper, page-16

Hi Jake, good thought provoking post, as no doubt, a combined entity would be a force to be reckoned with.

If I may discuss some of your points;

Santos does own the majority of the Moomba plant as well as the rest of the oil/gas infrastructure, BUT, they also have joint venture partners, namely BPT and ORG.

Also, Jake if you are interested, check out Santos' recent presentation, they state that Moomba etc is worth around $10 billion replacement value with the ability to be greatly upgraded... but would need lots of cash.

Santos is the operator, but they do not have crate-blanch in the Cooper regarding the assets (at least that is my understanding).

My take is that no-one in the Cooper wants to spend $$ making duplicating infrastructure, in fact Santos recently mentioned to the market they are looking at 'working with others' to reduce costs etc.

The respective holdings are averaged over both South Australia and Queensland.

(These are not perfectly accurate, but from memory very close)
STO - %62
BPT - %20.5
ORG - %17.5

(All IMHO) Regarding further local corporate activity in the Cooper Basin, my feeling is that BPT, SXY and DLS are all fiercely independent, so I do not believe we will see any deals between them (except for SXY and OGY), I do however thing a large outside entity will sooner or later take one of them out... which one... who knows.