RE:Feet, commerciality and so onYes good, solid points OCM. I had a long chat with a friend of mine in Alberta who has his eyes glued to this play. He says that you can bet that Exxon and every other operator in the basin does to.
My friend points out a couple of things that need confirmation. The first is the image of the Santonian. It could be an image of the cross section of the short axis across a very long, miles long, prehistoric river channel filled with oil bearing sediment. Like the cross section of a miles long meat loaf if you will. The volume could be humungous.
The second point is the nature of the migration pathways in the area. He noted that in the press release they mentioned that the presence of hydrocarbons uphole in the Campanian etc implied that hydrocarbons are probably present in the Santonian. There may be communication between the Santonian and the oil bearing formations uphole. If yes, then those 71 feet of pay identified so far may well be able to flow inordinate amounts of oil despite their shorter thicknesses.
All of this needs to be confirmed before they issue their next NR because they need to be careful what they report for the reasons that you mentioned. How long that process takes is now the question. He mentioned that MDT data, in conjunction with seismic, logs, rock samples, drilling data can usually identify if commuication does exist between stacked formations. Like if you have abnormally pressured Campanian, then what is the source of that pressure? From downhole?
Finally, he said that he is extremely impressed with the drilling team. They would have had to have handled over-pressured, spalling, sloughing shale coming at them all of the time. They mentioned hole instability problems on Kawa. They must have done an intensive post well review and "lessons learned" to be able to TD Wei so quickly in just over 4 months.
We didn't get into the financial stuff too much because neither of us knows much about it other than neither of us imagines that money can't be found if they deliver quality, credible results which, no doubt, they will.