SugeWhen you have a heavy mud you will see oil and gas shows,...

Suge
When you have a heavy mud you will see oil and gas shows, when there are hydrocarbons.
When you have a lower mud weight i.e. when you are drilling balanced you will see a higher amount of oil and gas shows because of connection gas, when you have hydrocarbons.

In the 200 formation no gas shows were reported because they had problems with mud logging equipment ( gas chromatograph did not work ?) , as I understood IVZ. Another strange point is for me that IVZ did not report any fluorecence in the mud or on the crushed cuttings when they drilled the 200 formation. One explanation could be that there is pure CH4 only ....but this does not fit with older reports that drinking water from water wells was contaminated with hydrocarbons??? You can drink water, contaminated with pure CH4 but not with hydrocarbons with much longer molekule chains, which can be seen as fluorescence when measured.

One problem with the 200 formation: IVZ reported it as a tight formation after wireline logging. Tight formations are sensitive to formation damage, when you drill with a high mud weight. In the case, that this a bedeviled exploration well and there is no oil, no gas in the deeper targets, IVZ will plan to plug and abandon the deeper formations. Next there is the option to perforate the 200 formation and to test it. If you have bad luck nothing or not much will flow because of the formation damage or skin effect. A little skin frac could be done to get better test results but I think IVZ is not prepared to do such a skin frac on short notice. So the high mud weight could have limited the options for the 200 formation. One desperate option could be to try an extreme overbanced perforation when you cannot organize a small frac job, but again I am not sure if IVZ can consider this option as well. And in the case the formation is tight because the sandstone is full of swelling clay I am afraid it could be not worth to perforate the 200 formation anyway in this well.

Rate of penetration (ROP): 200, 300 m/d drilling would be okay. One explanation that drilling in the shale and possible cap rock was slow could be that they used a drill bit with too small teeth. Drilling the sand stone formation should increase the ROP. But when they got the wrong bit again or very hard, abrasive sandstone the ROP can go down to 100 m/d or even lower. I think IVZ is already close to total depth, as long as IVZ had not more problems that could have caused delays.

I think if IVZ would have drilled through formations with heaps of gas already, we would see a higher and not a lower share price now.