I know that we are all down and are all looking for the "blame game". I am gutted just like everyone else, but such is the oil exploration business. SAMO might be a duster, but needless to say, there are other scenarios happening in the background.
For what it's worth an incredibly similar story,
".......
Thought I would send this Exxon story through to you as it feels like a similar story to FAR.
Opening up a new, globally significant oil province is never as easy as it looks. The first discovery may appear to come easy and indeed, some get lucky by making a discovery on the first well in a basin. As we know, oil fields are almost never sitting on their own, the industry creaming curve tells us this and from an explorers point of view, if there’s a working source rock proven to be expelling billions of barrels of oil, it’s also unlikely those billions are restricted to one geological trap.
The experience of FAR and the Samo-1 well is not dissimilar to the experience of ExxonMobil on the opposite side of the Atlantic where shortly after the FAN and SNE basin opening discoveries were made, ExxonMobil made the giant Liza oil discovery offshore Guyana. After a few appraisal wells, ExxonMobil stepped out to the next prospect, Skipjack. In their own words, ExxonMobil described this as a big surprise to come up dry. Back to the drawing board and, armed with the data collected from Skipjack, ExxonMobil then made the Payara, Snoek, Turbot, Ranger and Pacora discoveries in the same block as Liza. Sorubium was then dry and again followed by 2 more discoveries. The greater Liza complex now holds approximately 4 billion barrels of recoverable oil. It is currently under development and the development will peak with 4 FPSO’s producing 1 million bbls of oil per day.
FAR and their partners in the RSSD blocks offshore Senegal have to date made 4 discoveries (SNE, FAN, SNE north and Fan South) with SNE housing approximately 4 billion barrels of oil in place. FAR stepped south 20kms and the Samo-1 well was unsuccessful. However, this has given FAR crucial information to feed into the geological model to plan for the next well. You could say that FAR is just following in the footsteps of that other explorer, ExxonMobil! The source rock offshore Senegal/Gambia is known to be prolific and the geological puzzle is slowly being put together.
(20min delay)