RE: RE: Tullow or Exxon??“My view is that Exxon or the Chinese are both unlikely and not optimal partners. True, they have more money than God, but they are big, arrogant and slow to make decisions. A better partner would be a mid to large (not SuperMajor) co like Tullow, Murphy, Niko or Anandarko that has offshore experience, strong B/S and credibility.”
I totally agree. Exxon, Shell, BP and any other another supermajor will really slow things down, big-time. Everyone talks about the $ they have. But what people need to remember is that if you have a discovery, when does it get appraised? They will be the operators after the farm-out, not CGX. So they call the shots and they do have a lot of $, but they also have a lot of projects on the go that require big money to advance them. So any discovery in offshore Guyana would have to rank high on a supermajor’s list vs. what ever else they have going on in order to justify the operator to appraise the play in a faster timeframe. And the larger the company the more projects they have going on at once so the harder it is for any one project to move up that list. If a find is not as robust as others in W. Africa, the Middle East, …etc then the next appraisal well would take a long time, multiple years.
Besides what is the difference if a company has $2 Billion or $40 Billion in the bank. That still plenty to drill the first exploration well and that’s all you really need out of the farm-in.
I could see a Murphy, Noble, Anandarko, Devon, Marathon or someone of that size farm-in. Where they got the cash to do what they want and a 500 mmboe target is big enough for them to make an impact on their reserves and production. That would push them to appraise a find in a much quicker timeframe vs. a supermajor that targets 1+ Billion boe targets with all their exploration and development projects.
Right now I’d be shocked if Tullow farmed in. They don’t really have the money to be drilling these types of really expensive wells. They are fully financially caped with the appraisal/development of the 1.8 Bbo Jubilee field in Ghana and their Uganda plays.
As for Niko they don’t really have the cash either. They are expanding into Indonesia and Kurdistan as well as their D4 deep offshore block in India.
They will need all the $ they are generating to drill out all those targets. And they are making almost all their $ from US$4.50/mcf (US$27/boe) nat gas in India, not US$75 oil.
Plus remember that it was their partner Reliance, the largest company in India, that were the 90% operators on Niko’s D6 offshore block that made them what they are today. So how much of Niko’s success is theirs and how much of it is attributed to Reliance as the operator of that 10Tcf block?