new zealand announcement, page-8

BK,

The cost may well be $30 or $40 mm for the well as part of the Maari drilling, but I suspect near prohibitive for Whio, or for any of the larger prospects, as a stand alone drill. May not be a lot of other drilling campaigns to tag onto, and they too may be playing hardball. Plus for Whio, you absolutely neen OMV on board.

Sure the other prospects in the broader permit are targeting stand alone developments, but having OMV on board for these might just advance them considerably. I'd rather have 14% of these than 20, if it actually means getting an enthusiastic and capable operator derisking and drilling them.

As for the OMV article for reference, interestingly I note that there was no mention (at least in the online version) explicitly of CUE's final share in Whio. Any chance our buyer today misread/overlooked this?

Of course at 15 CUE still looks cheap imho if you view it's exploration program at all positively (as I do). The more that exploration spend is alongside credible profitable partners like OMV the more I like that program, less chance of wasted exploration dollars. Any freebie drilling is icing on the cake. Hard to put value on exploration permits without firm drilling, now at least we have something firm, albeit modest.

EL