General Thoughts, page-5113

I agree with coeus12345 that the Woodside board will not walk away from the farmin and will drill a prospect in PEL 87, possibly with a partner.

I would posit that individual board members for the sake of US$80-100 million would not risk some other company drilling a major oil discovery in PEL 87. The cost of a well is good insurance against this happening, even if dry. In a previous career, I have been in these board decision situations and if the drill will be in a 'hot area' as the Orange Basin is, you drill.

As to the matter of the Mopane Prospect, originally not a target for GALP as GALP like most companies exploring in a 'new basin' were chasing 'the hypnotism of the closed structure contour' - a structural high.
In the early GALP press releases, Cheetah was indicated as the initial drill prospect, a structural high obvious on the 2D seismic and further defined on the 3D.
After the oil shows only in tight carbonate reservoir, in the Shell Cullinan-1 well drilled on the Cullinan High, which extended into PEL 83, GALP would have reacted to drilling a structural high at Cheetah, like the knights in Monty Python's "Search for the Holy Grail'' on running across the killer white rabbit, 'run away, run away!'

So what was GALP to drill? The riskiest prospects you can drill as an explorationist is a stratigraphic trap.

The Venus Oil Discovery is a Cretaceous strat trap.

On the 2D seismic lines I have seen over the Venus Prospect, Venus is not an obvious strat trap. But shoot 3D over it and you can see the Venus strat trap a little clearer and map its morphology. More importantly the 3D seismic shows a very obvious AVO anomaly contour map coincident with the mapped strat trap. AVO's conformable with the mapped strat trap morphology cannot be walked away from. So TotalEnergie drilled Venus and the rest is history.

GALP when faced with the need to drill a commitment farmin well, tossed the structural Cheetah Prospect aside and started looking for a Cretaceous strat prospect to drill. Mopane on the northern flank of the Cullinan High would have been interpreted as a possible but not definitive strat trap on the 2D, but became much more obvious on 3D seismic with its coincident multiple level AVO's in the Cretaceous sands.

Given that AVO's on Cretaceous strat traps drilled by TotalEnergie and Shell were proving up significant light oil discoveries, the Mopane Prospect would be an obvious, but still high risk first drill for GALP, as not every AVO anomaly is a commercial oil discovery.

Mopane-1 was a light oil discovery and the follow up Mopane-2 confirmed the significant but not final extent of the Mopane Oil discovery and the validity of the AVO maps over Mopane.

So as PCL shareholders we await the final 3D AVO analysis and contour maps, which overlain with any 3D mapped Cretaceous strat traps will most likely determine where the first well will be drilled in PEL 87. There are obvious AVO anomalies at the Aptian 'Venus' horizon displayed in the south western part of PEL 87, an encouraging feature, would speculate. We await further interpretation and mapping of the 3D seismic, I would posit.

All the above is speculation on my part and based on publicly released information.

Risk in everything of course.