Agree that you have to be careful not to be outspent, but the...

Agree that you have to be careful not to be outspent, but the Total deal appears to give sufficient control to CTP as operator for a long period to limit this as posters have previously pointed out. And by all benchmarks, the Total deal is fine. You never get a premium for unproved shale areas. In fact, until recently you actually got them for almost nothing from respective state governments for a fairly limited work program. There seems to be a mistaken assumption that all these plays will work, and that the ingound potential resource will be magically turned into reserves.

In all likelihood, there will be plenty of areas that completely fail to deliver, and much has to be spent in proving up the ones that do work, or worse, in proving they don't work. It's a competitive environment out there, and if the deals were so poor there would have been others kicking down the doors with better offers.

I'm very happy with what has been achieved recently, and we're certainly better off than we were.