My thoughts:The Amadeus-Dukas issue is a chicken and egg...

My thoughts:

The Amadeus-Dukas issue is a chicken and egg standoff. They don't want to build the pipeline until there is gas to fill it, and while there's no pipeline to market, there's not much incentive to chase the gas. Santos will get back to it eventually, but as anyone who's ever been in a JV with Santos knows, their only concern is what's good for Santos. LD can push til he's blue in the face, he won't budge them.

Beyond that, CTP has had the same problem many juniors are having with attracting farm-in partners, the farm-in market is very difficult and has been for some years. Contributing factors IMO include: concerns over the long-term future of O&G, the increasing rate of exploration failures as the easy stuff has all been found, the increase in costs as regulatory burdens get heavier, public opposition by activists and the poor return on capital (and subsequent writedowns) for the colossal investments made from 2005 to 2015.

The classic business model for junior O&G companies was always to stake ground, prove up the prospects and leads, then farm down to get a major to drill it for free, but it just doesn't seem to happen much any more and when it does, it's with increasingly less impressive partners. BRU were lucky to get ORG interested but companies like CVN haven't been as lucky. The majors are focused on rationalising their own operations and if they are looking to buy (like WPL) there are plenty of low-risk discovered resources available from motivated sellers, with little need to chase frontier stuff.

Then COVID came along and made it even worse, it's hard to convince someone to pay for a Hail Mary wildcat when the oil price is actually negative. So that would have put paid to all the Amadeus prospects they were hoping to farm out.

So CTP is basically left having to fund its own wells, which given its cashflow and debt load is difficult and the pace of drilling is going to be slow. It's frustrating but that's life. I'm pretty keen for the Range pilot, I've heard good things about the appraisal wells they drilled which matches up with what CTP has said in its releases, and it's particularly interesting that they say the Taroom Coal Measures are expected to contribute as that is not usually the case outside of the CSG sweet spots, normally the upper coals are productive but the Tarooms are tight. It sounds like they have had had significantly better permeability results than expected and if the Tarooms are productive the upper coals are probably very productive, as that's how it tends to work in the Walloons.

A 3-spot pilot with 200m spacing should get some good water rates and hopefully a bit of gas, which should enable the block to be converted from 2C to 2P and then that should be bankable.

All in all I'm pretty positive on Range and Dukas, I just think the progress will continue to be slow and I don't think that's really CTP's fault.