Amity Oil's Richard Elliott outlined some of the bad experiences that can befall the E&P company, from Arctic conditions in Mediterranean Turkey to the well publicised corporate spats that caused a few board seats to shuffle.
The slides of the righands trudging through the blizzards that caused Elliott 'for the first time in over 30 years in the oil and gas industry' to walk off a rig, fitted well with pictures of what Elliott described as his motivational cheer squad - a turn of the century firing squad.
After flashing the AYO share chart with its low price of 44 cents and its subsequent strengthening - "if it gets lower than that again, I won't be here next year" - Elliott outlined how the situation has turned about with over half a dozen wells to look forward to, including the stalled Whicher Range follow up program.
Cooper Energy's Tony Wright had every reason to dance a jig with the Beverly Hillbillies theme song accompanying his entrance, complete with appropriate headgear. With a 100% exploration success rate to date (one from one) and $8 million in the bank from their IPO earlier this year, he had every right to be happy. If one could only ignore the fact that the oversubscribed float has not yet made it back to its 20c issue price after being sabotaged by a 'friendly' broker on the morning of the float.
ARC Energy and Australian Worldwide Exploration provided the morning's good news with ARC's view of the Perth Basin, on and offshore, coming up trumps for them, while Bruce Phillips from AWE outlined its growth to one of Australia's mid cap success stories after starting life in 1997 with no production and no cash flow.
The Hovea oil discovery looks like it will provide the base for ARC to leverage itself into a true operating company, said MD Eric Streitberg, and after farming out, still holds equity in the Cliff Head discovery in the offshore Perth Basin. This will be appraised in January next year.
AWE also has significant equity in some of the Perth Basin plays, but Bruce Phillips rightly stressed that the BassGas development in the Bass Strait was the real driver of his company, despite the pleasing successes of some of the lesser areas of their portfolio. First gas production is scheduled for the third quarter in 2004. With some excellently performing gas assets unfortunately located in the economic basket-case of Argentina, Phillips did share commiserations with Richard Elliott on operating in areas of instability.
Tomorrow's presentations include a good range of mid-sized exploration companies, including Hardman Resources, Tap Oil, ROC Oil, Oil Search and a host of junior companies including the unlisted Strike Oil which is currently drilling the gas discovery well, Casino-1, in the Otway Basin.
