No imminent JVGiven Frontera and CGX are doing a online presentation this upcoming Monday, I think its pretty clear no JV is on the immediate horizon. If anything, both management teams are likely hoping to broadcast their Kawa-1 results/upcoming Wei-1 well to as many external IOC/NOC companies as possible in hopes someone wants to join along that has not shown interest to date.
End of day, the Corentyne block still likely needs ~$1B USD in new spending (3-4 new exploration wells, 3-5 appraisal wells) before any meaningful FID is made.... look at Exxon and Apache as comparables for how exploration and appraisal drilling is conducted before massive (>$5B USD) investment decisions are made.
Now go look at Frontera 2022 CAPEX... as a company, they are only expected to spend $340-395 MM USD for the entire porfolio (~30% of which is attributed to Wei-1). At this pace, it would take bloody close to 10yrs for Frontera to fund a proper exploration-appraisal program in Corentyne.
So yeah, least on Monday we will get a update on the final Kawa-1 results... hopefully more oil than gas/gas condensate is reported over the 200ft net pay. But other than that, they can brag all day long about Wei-1 and the geological upside/'golden lane' potential and show how wonderful they are to the investment community. When boiled down, however, the hard truth is that Frontera knows it is desperate for a new JV parnter to inject real cash into Corentyne to take it to that next level. Why they haven't been able to ink that JV yet, who knows. We could all speculate until we are blue in the face.