An 18% chance of hitting oil with any one well means that with this first well there's better than a 80% chance this stock will fall and fall hard. Chariot Oil more than halved on the first dry hole and then fell an additional 67% on the 2nd. So I'd say there's an 80% chance we will see this puppy at $.50 before we see $2.00. At those odds why wouldn't short sellers come out in droves. Yeah, yeah I know IF they do hit the price will skyrocket.
A comparable situation might be Cobalt International Energy (NYSE - CIE). Back in late 2011 it started drilling in extremely deep waters off of Angola. It's price had in October fallen below $7 but on 12/15/11 it closed at $9.00. At $9.00/share CIE's market cap was $3.66 billion about 6X HRT's present cap. The next day CIE jumped $2.00 to $11.00 on news that they extended the lease on the rig and extral 2 weeks. On 12/20 the stock jumped to $13.85 on news that they struck oil. From there it's price steadly rose until Feb 9, 2013 where it closed at $23.90. The next day it gapped up as high as $36.51 before closing at $31.68 on news that the well had estimated reserves of 1 billion barrels. Since then it has drifted down to today's close of $27.22 amid charges of bribery and ways of extracting oil from such a depth (5,518 feet to seabed + 10,500 feet more).
CIE only owns 40% of this well or 400 million barrels. So 400 million barrels increased CIE's market cap by about $9.22 billion or anout $23/.barrel. ($31.68 - 9.00 = 22.68 X 406.69 shares = $9.22B / .4B = $23.06/barrel). IF HRT does happen to find oil, logic (I know, I know there's no logic in the market) should dictate that HRT's oil SHOULD be worth more per barrel. It's comparitively easier to extract than CIE's plus HRT controls other significant leases. Logic SHOULD (but won't) dictate that if HRT does find oil it SHOULD be worth somewhere north of $10 when it had no proven reserves.
Now I'll climb down from my soapbox before I fall and hurt myself.