Seismic licences can be quite restrictive and possibly WDS may not have strictly been entitled to share the 3D seismic data with 3rd parties. Afterall they had not earned an interest and were never on the PEL87 title. I think PCL made a point at some stage about novel aspects of the PEL87 seismic licence. Its possible the licensor of the data is actually NAMCOR but we don't know the contract details. I had some exposure 15 years ago to seismic licencing off Namibia and was quite struck by the strict licencing conditions that NAMCOR imposed. Far from the open file conditions we enjoy in Australia. We may never know for sure whether WDS did a full data dump under confidentiality with other companies prior to their withdrawal from exercising their option to drill. Today's Henry Hub US gas price $4.09 and one can only imagine how WDS could add value to those prices with their core business (LNG) via the Louisiana LNG project without taking on exploration risk.
Moosehead and Cullinan-1 need to be excluded from any dryhole analysis of the main play. Both were drilled on regional highs to test potential microbial (travertine-like) carbonates that work so beautifully at a similar stratigraphic level north of the Walvis Ridge in the pre-salt sequence on the Brasilian side of Atlantic rift. That success gave Petrobras a huge reserves boost. Much different sedimentary environments south of the ridge as Pancon have pointed out in the past. Early in the exploration cycle its natural to drill the big and obvious and be a hero or zero. End of that story
I attended the PESA lunch talk yesterday given by Searcher on new deep water frontiers. Would have been a waste for most PCL investors. She described 4 regions in the world, spoke very quickly and one had to listen very closely. The Orange Basin was discussed with Multi-Client data shown over Mopane. Things that struck me about Mopane were the relatively soft reflective nature of the known reservoir, gentle structural dip and that it seemed more sheetlike than the Saturn complex. Saturn a very different beast and the Rhino reservoirs appear generally sheetlike from commentary this week. The following section comes from the last PCL quarterly report. The annotations obscure seismic detail, unfortunately. Doing seismic interp on powerpoint and on limited internet data is pretty fraught.
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