operations update and new appointments, page-7

These JPR threads sometimes read like the fantasies of an online discussion group for the paranoid and pathalogically-depressed: people who only ever leave the house to visit their doctor or collect their medication.

JPR's ASX reports are actually a reasonably factual description of what is happening out there in the real world, as messy and unpredictable as that may be.

The people who run this company have been trying to do their ambitous best in a very difficult, unfamiliar, foreighn situation, so it's hardly surprising that things have not always gone as smoothly as they expected, or as they predicted at the outset.

Now that the Waterford are helping them though, they are in a very different situation. The Waterford group know exactly what they are doing in Kazakhstan and exactly what they are doing in the oil industry. They have seen it all before, done it all before, and made a great deal of money in the process. They know how to get things right in that country because they have been there for a very long time.

The latest announcement simply confirms that they know what they are doing. The first thing that you need in a country like Kazakhstan is a competent, effective national staff, to give you a complete command of the language, the politics, the technical issues and all financial matters. If you haven't got those, you can't even operate. So it is reassuring to see that they have ticked that box at the start.

The next thing you need is exploration success, specifically success with this current well. This would significantly increase the size of the resource that Waterford have bought into, and would produce an immediate increase in the value of the asset and a consequent increase in the JPR share price.

There is no certainty of success of course, but with their technical background in Kazakhstan, Waterford have been in a far better positon than anyone else to evaluate the risk. And they have not entered this project because they thought that they were going to fail.

And, apart from the acquisition of other resources on additional licenses, there's not much else that would make much difference to the value of JPR at this stage,

Certainly not a dribble of oil from that old Russian well, because JPR do not yet have a license to produce or sell any oil from it into the international markets. (Hence the need to add competent local lawyers to their staff).

Overall, things seem to be progressing well for JPR in Kazakhstan.

But don't pay any attention to me. I'm not a financial adviser. I just run resources projects in foreighn countries..