I've worked with enough drilling engineers that I wasn't surprised by the decision. They are inherently conservative in nature and they have the final say on when to pull up stumps (or at least should have the final say, if you want to avoid a Deepwater Horizon situation). I don't think the decision was primarily cost-saving, as I said earlier, >90% of the cost of the well is already sunk by that point, and the marginal cost of drilling the last few hundred metres of the lateral is minimal. So safety may have come into the decision, especially since they were drilling with air. I note that after the first gas flow test, they reported they were drilling ahead and intending to reach planned TD. So they weren't planning to rest on their laurels at that stage, but something changed and they decided to call TD early.
Re: perforating I believe they drilled the lateral barefoot so there was no production casing and no perforations. Another reason to avoid having too much overpressured, fractured pay zone open at once.
Re: filling the plant capacity, it's really too early to speculate on how long it might go until the EPT happens. It could be a small pocket of gas that will blow itself out in 30 days or less, that's not unusual in fractured reservoirs. There's also the gathering system to consider - perhaps the well is capable of 13 TJ/d but the gathering network can only deliver a fraction of that to the GPF, in which case the well will need to be choked back.
I'm cautiously optimistic for PV13, and CTP really needs it as it seems the restart of Palm Valley hasn't gone as well as hoped, which one well unable to be restarted (presumably due to fluid load) and the others seemingly declining faster than expected.
