Funny how people can look at the same report and interpret it...

Funny how people can look at the same report and interpret it wildly differently.

For me it was fairly neutral. Everything roughly as expected and no major surprises.

PV13 continues to knock it out of the park, 7 TJ/d since May and still on plateau. By my calculation it's closing in on 2 PJ production already and will exceed it by around March, which at $5/GJ is $10M revenue in less than a year. A real success story and augers well for future drilling at PV. And some people had a whinge about them calling TD early!

Mereenie is performing as expected, the AEMO data also gives 40.7 TJ/d average production so good to see those numbers line up exactly. However due to the IPL GSA expiring on 31 December, average production dropped from 40 TJ/d to about 26 TJ/d on New Year's Day and remains there, which is something they didn't clearly mention in the report (just a reference about this quarter's sales expected to be lower than last quarter).

Santos continue to drag heels on Dukas. No surprises there.

Farmdown efforts continue. LD mentions there has been some interest. I'd love to know from whom.

Range pilot is progressing and I look forward to those wells coming online. First gas planned for 2022 and my guess is that's the explanation for the why the AGL terms are structured as they are. CTP is overlifting MQG's gas from Mereenie to maximise cashflow in 2020 and 2021, then in 2022 they get minimal revenue but Range ramps up to take over. The capital requirements for Range are going to be pretty serious even at 50% WI.

Debt is looking okay at $73M but needs to be refinanced in September. They should hopefully benefit from lower interest rates but they are going to need to load up for Range, and I don't think they are going to be able to fund that entirely by debt, so I expect Range will require an equity raising too.

More generally, the Amadeus fields are now a fully mature operation supplying gas into the East Coast market via the NGP - basically fulfilling RC's goal. But they are still only roughly cashflow neutral, or at least they are after accounting for the accelerated principal repayments. There's no significant cashflow generation for funding exploration or Range coming from the Amadeus operations, much less for returning to shareholders, and there's scant wiggle room for drop in demand and/or gas price on the East Coast, as has happened with the expiry of the IPL GSA.

Recent SP performance is understandable with this in mind IMO. To generate significant positive cashflow, CTP needs to be maxxing Mereenie and selling that gas into the East Coast at a good price. It's not the end of the world if they're not, they are still generating enough cashflow to maintain production, cover interest and pay down the principal, but it's not a situation that they'd want to be in for long, as it doesn't provide much scope to chase growth, which is ultimately where shareholder value is going to come from.