I don’t have a good handle on infrastructure costs as I've been...

I don’t have a good handle on infrastructure costs as I've been out of the industry a few years but the infrastructure should be fairly similar to Senex's Atlas block and cost about the same, although Atlas is better so needed fewer wells to get to 30 TJ/d. Range would need a lot more wells drilled upfront as they would be slower to ramp up and have lower peak gas rates. So that's extra upfront capex.

Total cost would be in the hundreds of millions which is a lot for a minnow like CTP but plenty of other minnows have done it by showing success and letting the results do the talking, building MC to allow them to raise the funds. Cooper Energy, Strike Energy, even Senex itself all delivered or delivering major gas fields that cost multiples of their MC when they started it.

On top of that IPL was the JV partner so funding wouldn't have been an issue. They just needed to show success at the pilot stage, which they repeatedly were unable to do.