You may well be right about the $4M, costs in the Amadeus are...

You may well be right about the $4M, costs in the Amadeus are always hard to gauge. It just seems like a lot for only 800m of lateral air drilling with no new casing strings. Should have only been a couple of days' drilling.

It's not just about cost but quite possibly also a safety and equipment issue. Fractured zones are tricky to drill through and this was an air-drilled well, they might have had concerns around their ability to drill it safely, or even to prevent a blowout given the huge gas flows encountered. If you've already got flows of 13 TJ/d in a plant with only about 8 TJ/d ullage then that definitely needs to be factored in to the risk/reward equation.

I don't think reservoir communication will be an issue, there may be an issue around reservoir compartmentalisation. We know we must be in a new, untapped compartment since the rest of the field is so depleted, but we don't know how big that compartment is. Perhaps it's only small and by drilling the full lateral length they would have tapped another compartment and could have produced both of them, which may have significantly increased the well EUR. It's a risk, but IMO it's a fairly small one. My feeling is that if this is a small compartment that's going to blow itself out in a short period of time, then it's not hugely likely that the extra lateral length would have tapped the mother lode.