Hi DB I do take your point and certainly 10mc was referring to...

Hi DB

I do take your point and certainly 10mc was referring to 1billion in total, but from what he/she said below and what we know already I think 10mc was thinking mostly about the potential of the additional thin sands (but it would be best for 10mc to clarify):

10mc said: "Such a significant comment (NOT INCLUDED) in resources estimates. So WHAT would these thin bed sands add to the resource estimate if they are spread over many kilometres. We can assume that they tested these in SNE2 and they flowed 1,000 bopd. Just throwing a figure out there,... could SNE be holding 1 billion barrels of oil?"

After the SNE2 results, unless you believe in a conspiracy theory to hide the true nature of the results, whether or not the additional thin bed sands were included in the 15m heterolithic interval tested, the fact that the net pay from this is down to 3.5m (may be more to the east) does seem in my opinion to make a 1 billion total extremely unlikely.

Now I agree that CNE won't tell us the net pay for SNE2 overall and if the actual pay is a lot higher because the two DSTs are actually only a "sampling" of both the heterolithic sands and the blocky sands then we could be looking at an upwards revision in due course -kind of depends what CNE assumed in the first place.

But after the apparent relatively low percentage of the tested "pay' being productive at the upper thin sands it is in my opinion a bit of a stretch of the imagination to expect any additional thin bed sands identified by FAR to be a significant contributor to an imagined "billion barrel field" when we don't even know if Cairn, who did not consider these sands even worthy of inclusion in the first place, has even bothered to test them.

What would more likely set things alight a bit at SNE 3 would be:

1. Unexpected presence of productive blocky sands as per Hotazel theory.
2. Unexpectedly good pay and productivity of the 480 gas sands which are expected at this location to dip into the oil zone and are as yet untested.

pj