As a past oil and gas explorer and having successfully farmed out many wildcat oil and gas prospect drilling, not always discoveries of course, my experience is that if you have a big prospect in a 'hot area' like the Orange Basin, and even if other techos are bagging it, some techo will always think, "I can see something that these other geos/geofizzes cant see!" It is the nature of our business and why discoveries are often made when previous explorers have said of a prospect, "I will drink every drop of oil they find in that prospect!" My riposte was always "keep in mind that even a cup of oil will make you very sick!"
Throw in this "I can see something they cant see", and that a $100 million dry well is peanuts for the big majors, plus FOMO (fear of missing out), then I would speculate that the Saturn Prospect complex will get at least one well drilled on it.
And for good measure, I can just imagine Mr. Bose of Sintana, the consummate successful salesman/promoter and his comrade in arms Mr. Knowledge Hatti, canvassing potential PEL 83 farmin partners "You like Mopane?, boy have we got a deal for you over at Saturn/PEL 83! Act early to avoid disappointment!"
And on the mooted GALP-Mopane sale to Total, you don't think that in the board rooms of Chevron and Shell to name a few, the directors are sitting around the board table saying "How come Total got this Mopane deal with GALP and we missed out!" followed by "Well, what else is out there we can get into?"
I would have expected Shell to have made a serious play for Mopane for the same reasons that Total apparently have done a deal. Need the shallower oil fields to provide closer inshore production infrastructure- fpso, platform, pipeline,etc, so can eventually tie in their deeper oil and gas discoveries to the west and produce them.
All speculation on my part of course, but agree with other posters that the GALP- Mopane activity has to be a positive for PCL/Sintana current farmout efforts.
Apologies for waxing lyrical. So we hurry up and wait.
Risk in everything especially wildcat exploration.
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