Snorkel, with respect to your comments re: Santos, you might...

Snorkel, with respect to your comments re: Santos, you might find this interesting...

"After the Santos-Delhi joint venture was obliged to relinquish its SA Cooper Basin exploration tenements in 1999, there was an active campaign to assert that there was little further potential left in the basin. Looking back, Nelson notes with a wry smile that a particularly fine moment for Beach was firstly disproving this with flush new oil discoveries, then in 2007 buying Delhi Petroleum itself.

When Santos started, the view was that there wasn't much chance of finding oil in South Australia, so companies took large areas for long periods of time.

Effectively from 1954 – 1999 Santos and Delhi had almost exclusive tenure. The area shrank but they still held all of what we now know as the South Australian portion of the Cooper Basin. Delhi was the operator, did the drilling and made the first gas discovery at Gidgealpa and other places and eventually they found Moomba and Big Lake.

But in 1999 the tenure was up and they had to relinquish those areas. They were allowed to keep their production areas but not their exploration areas."

I've not seen the rumour you mention- maybe you were referring to my comments earlier about Santos processing the oil?