I've had a chance to sleep on it now and have come to the...

I've had a chance to sleep on it now and have come to the conclusion that the negativity is overcooked .

Oilex have got as far with 1.5 wells as the Yanks got with tens of wells . Of course the Yanks had proper budgets and as the Rolling Stones said in that bluegrass song they covered ; "no expectations" .

Still the response to shale outside the US goes to show how the revolution could only have happened in the US - everybody else is too quick to put shale in the too difficult bin .

Let's take two variables ; i) short lateral , ii) conductivity between the fracture networks of adjacent frac stages .

A) The overpressured fluids (gas , oil , condensate , frac fluid) will take the path of least resistance back to the wellbore .

If there is a lot of conductivity between the fracture networks initiated from adjacent frac stages , then the charge has two routes back to the wellbore .

Once the first route has cleaned up , the remainder of the charge will take that route rather than expel liquid from the other route .

B) The lateral is very short , there were only 4 frac stages

We don't know the relative contribution from each set of perforations and even if we did if there is conductivity between the fracture networks from adjacent stages we wouldn't know how effective each stage was .

Just because we haven't been told this information doesn't mean that all stages are contributing/contributing equally .

We were told that the diameter of the production tubing was too wide for the flow . Perhaps if all 4 stages were contributing well it wouldn't have been .