I'm at a loss to explain what went wrong with the desorption...

I'm at a loss to explain what went wrong with the desorption sampling. I've been over the Chiffre report in detail with a mate who's an ex-CSIRO PhD coal desorption expert, and he couldn't see any obvious errors either.

I have had issues with the accuracy of that particular contractor's analysis before but this is something else because the data set is all nice and consistent in the Patchawarra coals at least, so STX would have no reason to doubt that the saturations were accurate at around 40%, instead of the 90% they found when they put Chiffre online.

The only thing I can suggest is that it's something to do with the very high temperatures down there and the high CO2 content. Both of those factors mean gas leaks out faster while it's coming up from depth, and 2000m is a long way to bring up a core. It might have lost a lot more gas over that time than the standard calculation suggests, which would have been done after it had cooled down and lost some of its CO2. But I really don't know, suffice to say I definitely don't hold STX responsible for it. Both I and my mate who's a world expert in desorption would have thought the same thing.