Range ---is it a goer ?, page-4

It's hard to know whether it's a goer or not because they have completely misjudged the appraisal of it right from the start. The money and, even worse, the time they've wasted is very frustrating. It's been years.

I predicted this result as soon as they announced the single well pilots, because single well pilots have NEVER worked in tight Walloons coals. And yet a decade after every other operator in Qld CSG had figured that out and CTP's 3-well pilot had failed to flow much they still drilled two single well pilots.

They seem to have been clueless as to why the 3-well pilot failed and they blamed the thinner net coal intersected. And even worse, when they say "Range permeability appears more variable than exploration wells had indicated" it suggests to me they are STILL clueless. It's common for exploration wells to show decent permeability when you MDT them (because MDTs do not draw down reservoir pressure significantly) and then that permeability to crater when put on production, particularly with a single well pilot. That's because (to oversimplify it a bit) when you pump off the well you draw down the wellbore pressure and the elastic rebound closes up the cleats.

The part of the basin that Range is in is a tricky geodomain (for some quite technical reasons I won't go into) and I don't know for sure whether it will turn out to be commercial, but this isn't the way to test it. You have to mimic a production scenario - drill 10 to 12 wells in an extended pilot and turn them on together at a very low rate. The wells all help to dewater each other and you actually get the entire reservoir into the desorption window and releasing gas.

If CTP can't afford to test it properly then they should divest it. They've tried to test this on the cheap up to now and it has clearly failed.