Welcome Wasa. You are broadly right in that, as operator, ENI...

Welcome Wasa. You are broadly right in that, as operator, ENI feed updates to Kris/Neon. This trickles down into a market announcement if applicable. ENI do not determine the wording or regularity - you can see this in practice; NEN has been more regular than Kris and in one of the announcements Neon asserts that it was of its own opinion that the JV should move to a production test (way before the JV made the official decision).

However your post raises some out-of-the-box thinking around what may be happening in the background. If you accept the above is true, then:

1. Why haven't we got an announcement on Cua lo-1? Last Friday, 27th Dec, I called for an update. It was confirmed, re Vietnam, that no one was around that could accurately answer my questions and hence it would be better to raise next week. This throws up two possibilities:

a) All JV partners are offline or are in a reduced resource capacity so no updates are being provided
b) There is nothing to update

Point “a)” is a real possibility as ENI controls the update distribution. If ENI cannot support and manage at the corporate level (as we know drilling is continuing through the period) then they will not support information to the lesser partners. Remember ENI need to be aware at all levels FIRST – they are the operator.

Point “b)” is equally real. The reality is that the DST may not be where we think it is at. The most I was able to extract was that there were delays but nothing severe or major that would cause concern. Its possible that they haven’t even started but the likelihood is low.

2. Why haven’t we got an announcement on Ca Ngu-1? Similarly, all JV partners may be offline as previously mentioned. I would be very surprised if we had not reached the 9 5/8” casing point. This means we would have a very good idea about the upper objectives (including wireline). There is a possibility that we have reached TVD and know the lower Miocene objective (as at EOD today). If you assume this is true it does, again, throw up some questions:

a) Based on the results at Ca Ngu, are they so bad that the best course of action is to announce it with good results from Cua Lo-1?

b) Based on the results at Ca Ngu-1, are they so good that it warrants a production test or a series of wireline runs, and hence a separate announcement once these results are known? (i.e more time required)

This is just something to think about, its actually not my view.