drilling - ???????, page-2

Hi abuman

From memory it took 14 days from spud to announcement of preliminary results at Tiof. This was at TD of around 2850m in water depth of 1050m. Water depth at Poune is 1200m and as of today they have b been drilling for 10 days so I think they will be at or through the Miocene sands (at around 2700m is my guess, unless there have been delays), but not into the Upper Cretaceous. Previously they have not tested (or certainly not reported results from) upper level sands until TD was reached. So I don't think that we will see results of any kind out today. We could have results however by Friday!

The sp is simply languishing ahead of results and is likely as I said a few days ago to drift towards 68-70 as few buyers emerge.

The implications of Poune success or failure are a bit hard to judge given the market's reluctance to recognise successes so far this year. If it fails and its the last well this year (if they delay Pelican) then HDR would be sold down except that this time we have announcements about the declaration of commerciality and project funding for Ching to come in December which should help to maintain interest and see it go higher (I hope - in the absence of a capital raising that is!!!).

H