Without knowing what percentage is going to be farmed out, and whether it's even possible to drill offshore Puntland considering all the piracy issues, and how much dilution will be needed to fund all this it's impossible to say. Yeah at $5 a barrel, a 10 billion barrel block could be worth an awful lot. However...
- It'll be worth an awful lot less to current shareholders if there's going to be major dilution from here. And in 6 years, going by past records, there'll almost certainly be loads more shares in issue, or a consolidation and re-dilution of existing shares. I mean for goodness sake, when I first discovered Range back in early 2010, there were 800 million shares in issue. There's almost 3x as many now and that's been in a comparatively good period for the company. They had already done a consolition before that once the shares got to 2 billion, and look, we're back at the 2 billion mark again (well, 2.2 billion with the latest announcement).
- As no seismic has been carried out on said block or any offshore blocks nearby yet, you cannot possibly say how much prospective oil there is in it.
- As I'm not a geologist, I couldn't say how exactly an onshore discovery would affect the chances of an offshore discovery. It is clear, however, that one does not always lead to the other. Look at the North Sea in Britain- the North Sea is a good oil producing area, yet onshore Britain has very, very little oil at all.
Bottom line is, if it's going to take 6 years, you might as well look elsewhere. I've already pointed out one stock that's far more advanced in terms of planning a drill in a multi-billion barrel area that is trading at a far lesser market cap. I'm sure there's plenty more. 6 years is a hell of a long time to wait.
Sure, you could argue that because of Trinidad, onshore Puntland, Georgia etc, that the Range share price will be much higher in 6 years. You might be right. But that only reinforces the initial point that it's the short term value drivers that most investors look for, and pretty clearly the short term value has taken a hit to finance 2 projects, which good though they might turn out to be, are clearly a long time away from drilling, and an event longer time away from production.
RRS Price at posting:
20.0¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held