Merleredneck, No matter how confident a company is with growing...

Merleredneck,

No matter how confident a company is with growing it's production profile it's always going to cost more to squeeze out every last barrel of a field. In the US companies resort to water flooding, CO2 flooding, fraccing and even steam (when the oil is heavy). And even when these are done there is no guarantee that it will work, there is only a chance of success.

Unfortunately all the easy to find and producible barrels have already likely been discovered and companies are forced to explore in more dangerous locations where it is largely unproven and therefore the chance of success is diminished.

Not to mention the costs of operating in oil and gas has increased substantially over the past ten years and therefore exploring in some low risk locations are just uneconomic given the small resource sizes and the complexities of exploiting known undrained resources.

We are fortunate that NDO has a suite of known resources that are undeveloped and yet even these have risks. We should only look at the fact that Aboabo-1 had great flows and that's potentially a 1TCF field and that WL could be substantially above current estimates if the other reservoirs prove productive in further development phases. Even appraisal wells have a 20-50% chance of success and these fields will require these to develop or prove up reserves.

I agree that management needs a more balanced approach with shareholder capital management. Part of this lies with how they remunerate the executive team as there should be a larger capital management proportion to this as an overall shareholder return compared to a peer comparison KPI.