Personally i'd love them to go gold drilling asap. It will just add another string to the bow for APC in a market that is currently out of favour but likely to come back into favour around drilling time. I'm about to go on a gold rant so if this doesn't interest you then better to stop reading now.
Trump's policy of 'lets just build everything and reduce taxes' has been received extremely well by markets with the focus on a continuation of US budget deficits, but people are forgetting that it has to be financed somehow. Foreigners don't want to touch their bonds at the moment and there's no reason to suggest this won't extrapolate further. The biggest creditors to the US have been looking to hedge their reserves with gold and sell off as many treasuries as they possibly can in the meantime. Without the foreigners the only way they can finance the incoming deficits is through having the Fed print money at a pace many multiples of what they already have. This would see rates drop contrary to popular belief and inflation to eventually rear its head.
The US can't raise rates as simply as almost all economists are anticipating. The majority of US debt matures in the next couple of years. These days, unlike the constant comparison to Reagan, Trump is faced with essentially short term adjustable rate debt that can't be financed in the same way as Reagan's fixed rate long term debt. The US currently pays around $250M per year in interest payments on their debt with rates at virtually zero. Even at near zero rates, the US is forced to borrow further in order to pay the both the principal and interest on the debt, constantly raising the debt ceiling and essentially running a ponzi scheme. If short term rates were to normalise even slightly, the only logical way for the US to finance this debt would be mass QE, as the interest expense would be astronomical and completely unpayable. This process would be highly inflationary and cause a situation where the Fed will need to make a critical decision, spike rates in a desperate attempt to entice foreigners to buy their bonds and collapse the asset bubbles caused from the misallocation of resources with rates being held far too low for far too long, or monetise the debts further and destroy the purchasing power of the dollar.
Anyway, bottom line, here's hoping APC can start drilling and garner some extra market attention in a hopefully rising 2017 gold bull market.
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