I think this is the relevant transcript that Ya mentioned
"Moving now to our frontier operated deep water programme in Senegal. We have a large acreage position offshore Senegal, straddling the shelf and into the deep water. Oil is present in the shallow water here, as it is in many of the shallow water areas adjacent to our licence acreage around the North West African margin. What we’re doing is stepping off into the deeper water where we know that extensive source rocks and Cretaceous fan sand systems extend into the deep water here. So these are very important wells trying to open up a new basin, and the key of these frontier wells is that should they come in ( we now know that since this presentation they have found oil in FAN-1) then there is a huge amount of follow up potential. The well has been delayed, we’ve had to undertake quite a lot of maintenance on the rig, but we are still operating and we expect the well to be fully completed sometime at around the end of this month, and until then we can’t really say too much more. What I will remind you of is that this is a very large set of prospects, stacked systems in the Lower Cretaceous with very large volumes of potential resources, and this is the north fan here. In the event that this one comes in, there are a string of other similar lookalike prospects in the area. Any one of these levels that comes in, and there are others in addition to this, even within this well, and any one of these is on its own is commercially very attractive under Senegalese terms.
Once this well is finished sometime in early September, we’ll move the rig across and finish off the Shelf Edge well. We have done the top hole section on this, a bit, in a way, like Statoil are doing in their Barents programme as well. We have done the top hole, and again this is a multi-target, multi-stacked resource in here, and again, if this comes in then we do have a string of other follow-on possibilities. The results of the two wells, there is some dependency, clearly a good result here will be helpful for the Shelf Edge prospect, but also the Shelf Edge prospect is dealing with different reservoirs and it also has the potential for feed from a slightly different number of source rocks as well, so there is some independence to it, but these are very exciting prospects."
This leads me to a question someone may be able to answer, can one sell the interests in one project within a lease and still retain interests in the remainder of the lease ?. I can't imagine why not but there may be a reason. This is quite important as there seems to be a lot of potential within the leases. However it would mean we would be up for 15% of any exploration costs going forward so we may need to farm down our 15% depending of course what we got from any sale. I could certainly see it as part of any negotiations.
Meanwhile we wait to see if it is commercial, if so then there are some interesting times ahead.
Cheers Whisky
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