elephant country?

No not a white elephant!

I had a chat with my friend who works for Santos, who has been mentioned here often over the years & who has been constantly unimpressed by ctp. He has been waiting for the helium targets. However, there?s now a change in him.

He?s excited about Johnston. It?s the fact that there is 88m of hydrocarbon shows, including the 6m of good stuff that ctp have dipped their toe into. It might only be 6m, but it could go a whole lot further down. As there has been so much oil shows already, the likelihood is that there is going to be some more of the black stuff down there.

He thinks if this well flows to surface, then we could be looking at recoverable amounts of 6m to 12m barrels. I asked about the costs of extraction from such a remote location (as somebody on this site suggested it might not be commercial) & he said it is no problem at all. The bigger the find, the cheaper the rate to a degree, of course.

I do recall a figure of $10 or $20 a barrel that the company had mentioned for the equally remote Blamore well. They said that they could truck it to Alice Springs & train it north. Santos man suggests there are other possibilities too, but $40 barrels profit is a very minimum, assuming flow rates are ok.

When quizzed about the possibilities of a 500m find, he said it?s most unlikely, but the high estimates do come up at times. If we are to work on a 1% chance, well he said there has been 100?s of wells drilled & he can only recall one which has hit the high mark recently (coe?s?). So statistically speaking, why not, as we have already had the other 99% drilled!

Of course oil might not flow to surface at Johnston. But he said that that isn?t the point. The game has changed in his opinion. Even at the current depth they have found 88m of hydrocarbon shows, but that will go over the 100 metre mark he thinks. That?s way more than anything that the cooper basin has come up with.

He suggests 100m+ of shows means there?s probably an elephant out there. The hydrocarbons are there, the age is there & there will be traps about. All of the company?s resources should be switched to that area. Farmin partners will be easy to find too.

It?s elephant hunting season!

This is just our opinions of course, & santos man is just one of the lackies - no geo or hot shot. And whilst I hold, I don't have many shares. Biotechs is my game.

Good luck to holders