Question: Given your experience with Anadarko in Sierra Leone and Liberia were you not tempted to follow them into East Africa as you were in Kenya?
I hate it when somebody else comes up with a big field. We know that Anadarko was marking the block for some time and of course we and many other companies looked at it. It was a very good prospect but if our internal TRs and PRs are too strict, then we couldn’t put together a marketing venture so it survived all the geological tests but when it came to the market we couldn’t make it. Maybe it is because we were probably conservative on the pre-drill as it is easier to market 40 seconds than 25 so maybe in the end it didn’t work because of the sheer size of it. We decided that we couldn’t spend much more time in East Africa because we had gone through a long process selecting a good oil venture which is our intention in offshore Kenya. When we failed and we chopped the number one it will take us some time to recover. That is when we have looked at other people’s acreage too and we couldn’t put together a gas marketing scheme, or the people that do it couldn’t put it together for us to support it, but we probably didn’t factor in our experience in Kenya. We were looking at East Africa again for the last year and the regional studies that we have been looking at because we could have been running the regional assessment in order to agree with it.
Question: Is there any of your acreage where you think you need to bring somebody in who is better at the regional geology or has got better ideas?
In our acreage?
Question: Yes.
We have always benefited, and this is an honest statement, from having partners. This company had some non API things in the past like drilling 100% in Cuba.....we are never sure enough of our ideas to do whatever we want without listening in with another one. In Cuba now we are very comfortable because we have two partners that are looking at what we are doing all the time. If there is activity in exploration in Repsol, part of the change has been that we have rationalised our portfolio and if you remember Malbec, we were 100%, so we have done a good job of distributing risk and profiting from other companies’ ideas and we will continue to do that.
