Bellatrix next, page-57

ooo and Whisky

Not sure why you are so worried about Bellatrix OOO. Here is a comment from Cairn's exploration guys from thye May Capital Markets Day transcript.

"The lowest risk here, Bellatrix, which overlies the SNE field to the north, or partially overlies it, a very high chance of success. You know you’re on the migration path, you know you have a pretty robust structure. And there are geophysical attributes that you can use in the 3D data that give you a very good feel that some oil and gas will be found in that location".

The geophysical attributes I will come to later. Here's another comments:

Q: "And with Bellatrix is there a gas risk there would you say?

Richard Heaton
"I think that we have taken into account in our volumetrics that there are obviously a range of possibilities for what the gas versus oil split is going to be, so there's an assumption in there that there is likely to be some. But as in SNE we don’t see that as being particularly large in the most likely case."

On the geophysical attributes FAR says:

"Strong amplitude response, conforms to structure"

And somewhere I recall reading from FAR or perhaps Cairns (but can't find the reference) that the amplitude anomoly at SNE turned out to be the gas/oil interface .... that's why its got a lot bigger than pre-drill. They are saying that Bellatrix has the same amplitude anomoly as SNE. Logically now that that anomoly has been "ground truth" by SNE what they are saying is that they are almost certain there is oil at Bellatrix (and not just gas or not too mich gas (from the above comments from Cairn".

That all sounds better than FAR's estimate of 49% to me. Do you think it may be possible that because FAR wanted the other shelf prospects to be drilled instead of Bellatricx they gave it a lower COS than Cairn?

Nothing is certain but a highly successful company like Cairn wouldn't put an unprecedented 80% COS on a prospect just for the hell of it surely.

H