Well, that is just ridiculous, this company is not a producer,...

Well, that is just ridiculous, this company is not a producer, exploration is not production.  Being an operator of an exploration project has nothing to do with incurring overheads for a production team.

I would hazard to say that I am aware of a number of small cap O&G companies that are operators that do not have production.  You may well use your reference to "decent sized projects" as a filter but what is a decent size project?  Isn't the goal of an exploration company to find a decent size project?

Finally, I am also aware of many oil producing companies that dont have multi-million dollar per year teams behind them..  Perhaps you are thinking of the wrong small cap company with a code other than MEL...