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Don,

Additional laterals from the vertical are certainly possible, they are called multilaterals.

3D seismic is always preferable but not absolutely necessary if you're willing to take the chance of faulting etc. You just use your geosteering tool (gamma ray in this case) to tell you when you are reaching the floor or roof of the sandstone reservoir, and adjust your drilling direction up or down accordingly.

Problem is if you go through a fault, in which case you have no idea whether you need to go up or down to regain the reservoir.

As for the oil quality, it's fantastic, much better than I expected given the photos they showed us and the GWR results which suggested very heavy oil. Light sweet crude at 40 API is basically Tapis crude so they'll get the full oil price. Heavy oil suffers a discount that can be $15/bbl or more, plus it doesn't flow very well.

The reason for the GWR indicator failing seems to be because there is VERY little gas in this oil. Whether this has something to do with the age of the oil, being so much older than most oil deposits around the world, I really don't know.

But it really goes to show what I've said all along since I started posting here, which is that when it comes to geology you just cannot take anything for granted. We saw that with JW's failure to flow, but now we've got it back the other way and Mother Earth has cut us a break. :)