Selling Zola and Tallaganda will be a mistake

The Shale Gas Ponzi scheme is unravelling.

When it does, TAP will then be sitting on a gold mine(GAS),

Like MEO today, the gas TAP has is real. Give it a few years and it has the potential to be worth a fortune.

I'm sure Troy is WELL aware of this. Below is a few pointers to why I believe TAP is sitting on a fortune. I tank my stars TAP is now over 60 cents, so much for so little. We are so lucky it has not been taken over before it reaches it true potential.
Debt Rattle Aug 4 2014: Debt and Energy, Shale and the Arctic

Aug042014

August 4, 2014  Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:36 pm Energy, Finance Tagged with: arctic, credit, power, Shale, Shell

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Jack Delano Migratory farm worker from Florida in her Sunday clothes July 1940

I know I’ve talked about it more than once lately, but at least for now I don’t think it can be said enough. The world energy situation is much worse than you have been, and are being, led to believe. Even if you do understand the principle that underlies peak oil (by no means a given).
I’ve also repeatedly made the point that the real energy predicament is the real driver behind recent geopolitical events, notably Ukraine. Which is not to say that Libya, Iraq, Gaza or the South China Sea are not, just the Ukraine seems fresher and a more overt play for fossil resources. But let’s stay away from politics today – much as we can -.
The Daily Telegraph gives a podium to Tim Morgan, former global head of research at inter-dealer money broker Tullett Prebon, to present his view of the shale industry. Morgan draws the same conclusion that we at The Automatic Earth drew years ago – only now it’s news … -, and wrote about on numerous occasions.
See for instance Get ready for the North American gas shock, Fracking Our Future , Shale Gas Reality Begins to Dawn , Shale Is A Pipedream Sold To Greater Fools, The Darker Shades Of Shale . And that’s just a sample.
I may like to think that we have over time demolished shale as a viable energy industry so rigorously that nothing should need to be said it anymore. But no, it needs to be repeated by ever more well-placed individuals before it sinks in. So be it.
That conclusion is, shale is about money, not energy. And as such it is a huge money drain. It’s not an asset, it’s a sinkhole. As I cited only last week, the US shale industry lost over $110 billion per year over the past 5 years. That’s half a trillion dollars down the waste hole. In cheap credit. Who’s going to pick up that tab?
In essence, shale, and hence fracking, is nothing more, or less, than the purest form of land speculation. Location, location, location. The only thing that appears to make it stick out from other forms of land speculation is its utterly destructive character. It smells of desperation no matter what direction the wind comes from.
Money broker Morgan focuses on Britain and its ill-fated shale dreams:
Shale Gas: ‘The Dotcom Bubble Of Our Times’
[..] hardly anyone seems to have asked the one question which is surely fundamental: does shale development make economic sense? My conclusion is that it does not. That Britain needs new energy sources is surely beyond dispute. Between 2003 and 2013, domestic production of oil and gas slumped by 62% and 65% respectively, while coal output decreased by 55%. Despite sharp increases in the output of renewables, overall energy production has fallen by more than half. [..]
Those who claim that Britain faces an energy squeeze are right, then. But those who claim that the answer is using fracking to extract gas from shale formations are guilty of putting hope ahead of reality. The example held up by the pro-fracking lobby is, of course, the US, where fracking has produced so much gas that the market has been oversupplied, forcing gas prices sharply downwards.
The trouble with this parallel is that it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the US shale story. We now have more than enough data to know what has really happened in America. Shale has been hyped (“Saudi America”) and investors have poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the shale sector. If you invest this much, you get a lot of wells [..]. If a huge number of wells come on stream in a short time, you get a lot of initial production. This is exactly what has happened in the US.
The key word here, though, is “initial”[..] Compared with “normal” oil and gas wells, where output typically decreases by 7%-10% annually, rates of decline for shale wells are dramatically worse. It is by no means unusual for production from each well to fall by 60% or more in the first 12 months of operations.
All this is old fodder for our readership. If anything, that 60% decline in the first year of a typical well is greatly underestimated.
Faced with such rates of decline, the only way to keep production rates up (and to keep investors on side) is to drill yet more wells. This puts operators on a “drilling treadmill”, which should worry local residents just as much as investors. Net cash flow from US shale has been negative year after year, and some of the industry’s biggest names have already walked away. The seemingly inevitable outcome for the US shale industry is that, once investors wise up, and once the drilling sweet spots have been used, production will slump, probably peaking in 2017-18 and falling precipitously after that. The US is already littered with wells that have been abandoned, often without the site being cleaned up.
2017-18? I doubt the US shale industry’s will make it in one piece that long. My bet would be investors will run for cover before.