No doubt tremendous credit should be given to the old CTP team who embarked on kicking off a lateral for the Surprise 1. It was the first and only horizontal well to flow oil to surface unassisted in onshore Australia. That will go down in the history books. Even Santos is suddenly awakened by the implications of the Surprise 1 discovery. They have recently bought out their existing Mereenie fields interest and is now spending $100 mil to explore and appraise it further, on top(?) of the $30 mil that they are going to spend for our phase1. They think they can get a lot more oil out using horizontal drilling technique.
With that much interest in the Amadeus, it's hard to imagine that they will let anyone else farm into Surprise. If a 200 metre lateral can produce 200-400 bopd, then it's not unreasonable to expect that a 1km lateral will produce in excess of 1,000 bopd. I'm pretty sure a horizontal fracced shale well in the US is deemed an excellent producer with that kind of flow rates. Here we are flowing without the need to frac. And yes there should be plenty of Surprise look alike nearby waiting to be discovered!
CTP Price at posting:
52.5¢ Sentiment: LT Buy Disclosure: Held
