From the latest company's drilling update....17 Feb

http://moneyam.uk-wire.com/cgi-bin/articles/200402170700084897V.html

Can anyone with mining knowledge explain these terms....

What does sidetracking mean? Approx how ong will that take?
Approx. how long will it take to correct a deviated section?
Is 'crude oil in shale samples' a good indication that there is oil?
Is 'Gas-bearing porous sands being logged' a good indication that there is gas?
Basically what does logging involve ?

Any views re AEX potential??

Regards
Stephen

Hopefully.

Thanks Paul!

Silly me! -So busy I was only thinking of the oil rigs in the Gulf!

Off to look at the latest on Rita now.

Told a collegue on Tuesday that if/when Rita enters the Gulf she could soon become another cat5 hurricane. Sea surface temp was still 31C last time I checked..........not at all good. Katrina had me very worried before landfall and now Rita has me also.

At least peeps will be better prepared for this one. With any luck it may miss the major population areas.

Once again thanks for the info Paul! -Always appreciated.

Just been looking at the latest data for Rita's path and sea surface temps.

Not good.............the potential for this storm is much greater than it was for Katrina.

Too early yet to call for sure but because of it's path across the Gulf and the surface temp in that area this could be a record breaker.

Predicted landfall very close to Houston and this is another big one which could get a fair bit bigger yet.

The next two days developements will be telling but so far this looks very bad indeed.

I'll be watching daily till the weekend now.

Stringy Hi,

Thanks for the updates :)

I bet they have done everything possible to restrict possible damage, like removing or tying down anything that moves !

All staff will be well away from there too.

Cheers,
PM

Hurricane Rita creates evacuation problem for Houston
By Simon Freeman, Times Online, and Tim Reid

More than a million people were today joining a mass exodus from Houston and southern Texas as Hurricane Rita intensified into one of the most powerful storms on record, threatening widespread devastation across the Gulf Coast.

Evacuees fleeing the threatened regions created bumper-to-bumper traffic jams along all of the major interstate highways as families fled to seek shelter inland.

The 300-mile wide hurricane, which has now intensified into the most powerful Category 5 level with sustained 175mph winds, has pushed oil prices back up to $68 a barrel as it bears down on the mainland.

President Bush, in Washington, said: "We hope and pray that Hurricane Rita will not be a devastating storm, but we got to be ready for the worst."

Three of the country's five largest oil refineries lie in the storm's predicted path before it makes landfall on Saturday in Galveston, Texas. Agbeli Ameko, an energy analyst, said: "What wasnt hit by Katrina is being targeted by Rita. The market is taking the storm very seriously."

As the Texas coast was emptied, officials in New Orleans warned that just 3in of rain could overwhelm the protective levees still not fully repaired from Hurricane Katrina. The city is so fragile that even a glancing blow could bring renewed devastation.

Galveston, low-lying parts of Corpus Christi and Houston, and New Orleans were under mandatory evacuation orders as Rita continued to draw energy from the unseasonably warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

"Its scary. Its really scary," Shalonda Dunn said as she and her two young daughters waited to board a bus arranged by emergency authorities in Galveston. "Im glad weve got the opportunity to leave. ... You never know what can happen."

Rita also forced some Katrina refugees to flee a hurricane for the second time in three weeks. More than 1,000 people who had been living in the civic centre in Lake Charles were being bussed farther north.

At 2am EDT (0700BST) today, Rita was centered about 540 miles east-southeast of Galveston, moving west at 9mph.

But with its breathtaking size - tropical storm-force winds extending 370 miles across - practically the entire western end of the Gulf Coast was in danger.

In Houston, the states largest city and home to the highest concentration of refugees from Hurricane Katrina, geography makes evacuation particularly tricky.

While many hurricane-prone cities are on the coast, Houston is 60 miles inland, so a coastal suburban area of 2 million people must evacuate through a metropolitan area of 4 million people where the roads are often congested.

Mayor Bill White urged residents to look out for each other: "There will not be enough government vehicles to go and evacuate everybody in every area. We need neighbour caring for neighbour."

back monday see my notice then.aex will take off again.

Tanker Hi,

Thats if it hasn't already 'taken off' .... into Hurricane Rita ....

Cheers,
PM

Rita not looking quite as serious as she was last night. Downgraded to cat4 now.

Passing over some cooler sea but closing on another 'hot' patch shortly which may give another boost. Some cooler water nearer the coast though so by landfall may be cat4 or even cat3. Did expect worse but these things can be a bit unpredictable.

The predicted path is now close to but just East of Galveston.........yesterdays was West which would have been worse. East will give a lower wind speed for that area.

All in all looking less serious but still early days and may yet score a direct hit on Galveston and Houston.......looks like being very close either way.

Tomorrow's data will give a much more accurate forecast.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=1150674

Looks unclear. I went long in US Crude yesterday afternoon but down 70 cents since then and not sure on how Rita is gonna hit. Even if they have prepared well and it reaches the coast as a CAT 3, the industry could be trashed.

I agree Stringy, its gonna be later on today until things look a bit clearer....

Tense times. Cant believe the season this year....real hectic.

Rita heading slightly north-west now, perhaps hitting close to Louisiana border. Currently expecting to hit at Force 4.

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at3+shtml/085714.shtml?prob

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at3+shtml/085714.shtml?prob

Is the World Running Out of Oil?

by Joseph Nocera from the New York Times, Sept 10.

We're halfway through the hydrocarbon era," my old friend T. Boone Pickens has been saying for the last couple of years. You may remember Mr. Pickens as the most famous corporate raider of the 1980's, but he has spent his life in the oil patch. A geologist by training, Mr. Pickens founded Mesa Petroleum at the age of 26 and ran it for the next 40 years. Now, at 77, he works the oil patch in a different way, running a pair of energy-oriented hedge funds in Dallas.

A folksy line like Mr. Pickens's - it sticks with you. But I hadn't realized until recently that it also meant Mr. Pickens had taken sides in a surprisingly heated debate. He subscribes to what is being called the peak oil hypothesis, which holds that there simply isn't very much new oil left to be found in the world. As a result, we are currently in the gradual process of draining the more than a trillion barrels of proven reserves that are still in the ground. And when it's gone, it's gone.

The best-known "peakist" these days is Matthew R. Simmons, who runs Simmons & Company, an investment bank and consulting firm in Houston specializing in energy companies. Mr. Simmons's essential belief, he told me recently, is that energy demand is about to exceed supply significantly. And that was pre-Hurricane Katrina - before the storm damaged refineries, pipelines and offshore rigs all along the Gulf Coast. "I would argue that we are in a serious energy crisis," Mr. Simmons added. He forecasts increasing oil prices.

There is a second group of forecasters, though, who argue with equal vehemence that the world is not in an energy crisis and it probably won't face one for a very long time. The best-known proponent of this view is Daniel Yergin, author of "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power," a history of oil that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, and the founder of a rather sizable consulting firm, Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

"This is the fifth time that we're supposedly running out of oil," Mr. Yergin said. But, he added, each time new technologies made it possible for oil companies to find new sources of oil and extract new oil from old sources. His firm released a survey a few months ago that says from 2004 to 2010, world oil supplies will have increased by as much as 16 million barrels a day, "outstripping the likely demand increase." Most of those who hold this view say that oil prices will eventually drift down.

DOES it surprise you to learn that when it comes to one of most vital resources known to man, there could be such an incredible divergence of opinion? It sure surprised me. Even some of the oil majors are on opposites sides, with Chevron taking the peakist view, and Exxon Mobil more aligned with the Yergin camp.

There are three reasons for this lack of consensus. First, because oil is buried underground, it is hard to measure. So basic "facts" - like how much oil remains, and how much can be ultimately extracted - are as much the product of guesswork as science. Second, the world of oil can be shrouded in secrecy. As an article in The New York Times Magazine recently pointed out, Saudi Arabia, the biggest producer of them all, won't even allow its reserve and production data to be audited.

Finally, though, the fact that this enormous divergence has developed speaks volumes about the very different way each camp views the world. "It's the geologists on one side and the economists on the other side," was the way the energy analyst Seth Kleinman of PFC Energy in Washington put it recently. That's an overgeneralization, of course, but one that contains plenty of truth.

The two sides do agree on one thing: the recent run-up in oil prices, which began well before Hurricane Katrina, has come about because demand for oil has caught up with supply. The enormous burst of economic activity in China, the generally good economic conditions in the United States and the rest of the West - these and other factors have led to a surge in oil demand.

"The world produces about 85 million barrels a day," Mr. Pickens said. "That's where demand is now, too. And I've seen forecasts that demand is going to be higher than that by the end of the year."

What's more, Mr. Pickens added, pre-Hurricane Katrina refining capacity was already at the breaking point, which is another point that is pretty unarguable. "Refineries were operating at 96 percent," he said. "You can't operate anything at 96 percent. It'll start breaking down."

That last paragraph, though, encapsulates the world view of the peakists: all the easy deals have been done. One reason refineries are operating at such high capacity is that no new refineries have been built in the United States for some 30 years, which Mr. Simmons believes can be attributed to the shortsightedness of the industry. "My theory was that if the industry didn't expand like crazy the U.S. would find itself running short of energy." It didn't, and we are.

Even more troubling, the pessimists believe that it is going to be increasingly difficult to replace the oil that we're now using up. "Let me give you a number that is pretty shocking when you hear it," Mr. Pickens said. "The world uses 30 billion barrels of oil a year. There is no way we're replacing 30 billion barrels of oil. Just a million barrels a day is 1,000 wells producing 1,000 barrels. That's big."

How do the economists counter the geologists' arguments? They don't deny that it is hard to find new oil. But they believe that whenever tight supplies push up the price of oil, the rising price itself becomes our salvation. For one thing, higher prices temper demand as people begin to change their energy habits. (Mr. Pickens believes this as well.) Surprisingly, this has not yet happened even as gasoline at the pump has more than doubled in the last year or so. But inevitably, there will come a point when it will change behaviors.

Secondly, they believe higher prices spur innovation. Oil that couldn't be extracted profitably at, say, $15 a barrel, can be enormously profitable at $60 a barrel. In the view of Mr. Yergin and his allies, in fact, this is exactly what has been happening. They point to new oil that is coming out of the Caspian Sea, deepwater drilling in Brazil and the oil sands in northern Alberta as examples. The 16 million barrels a day of new oil Mr. Yergin expects to see by 2010, he told me, "is predicated on $25-to-$30 oil." If oil stays higher than that, then there will be even more investment, and not just in ways to extract oil, but in new refineries and pipelines and other infrastructure.

If you mention this theory to a hard-core peakist like Mr. Simmons, you'd better be ready for an earful. "These economists are so smug," he said derisively. "All they talk about is the magic of the free market. They don't seem to understand that this is incredibly capital intensive."

He pointed to those Canadian oil sands - where, he said, Shell Canada recently announced it was going to raise its investment to $7.3 billion from $4 billion to produce an additional 100,000 barrels a day. "Just think about that; $3.3 billion for just 100,000 barrels," he said. "Doesn't that tell you something?"

Of course the economists can be just as dismissive of the peakists. "I've gone from disagreeing with them to debunking them," scoffed the energy consultant Michael C. Lynch. "I believe the world will expand the reserve base. If you put a road in the middle of the jungle, that can wind up expanding the resource base."

"By most estimates," he added, "total global resources is eight trillion barrels of oil. They are saying only a small percentage of that is recoverable, and you can't do anything about it. We are saying the amount that is recoverable expands over time."

I wish I had the confidence to make my own forecast, but in this case, I don't. What I do know - what we all know - is that oil is a finite resource. Surely, the peakists are right about that. What I also know is historically, the economists have generally been right about how the price of oil has wound up fixing the problem.

As Gary N. Ross, the chief executive of the PIRA Energy Group, puts it: "Price is the only thing that matters. The new threshold of price will do its magic on the supply-and-demand side."

After all, it always has before. And it will again. Until it doesn't.

Published: Saturday, September 24, 2005
BEAUMONT, Texas (AP) Hurricane Rita steamed toward refinery towns along the Texas-Louisiana coast with 120 mph winds Friday, creating havoc even before it arrived: Levee breaks caused new flooding in New Orleans, and as many as 24 people were killed when a bus carrying nursing-home evacuees caught fire in a traffic jam.

Rita weakened during the day into a Category 3 hurricane after raging as a Category 5, 175-mph monster earlier in the week. But it was still a highly dangerous storm.

The hurricane was expected to come ashore early Saturday on a course that could spare Houston and Galveston but slam the oil refining towns of Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas, and Lake Charles, La., with a 20-foot storm surge, towering waves and up to 25 inches of rain.

"That's where people are going to die," said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center. "All these areas are just going to get absolutely clobbered by the storm surge."

Late Friday, southwestern Louisiana was soaked by driving rain and coastal flooding. Sugarcane fields, ranches and marshlands were already under water at dusk in coastal Cameron Parish.

The sparsely populated region was almost completely evacuated, but authorities rushed to the aid of a man who had decided to ride out the storm in a house near the Gulf of Mexico after one of man's friends called for help.

They were turned back by flooded roads.

"He's going to take the full brunt of this hurricane coming in," sheriff's Capt. James Hines said.

Police rescued four people huddled under an overhang outside the locked downtown civic center. "There's probably going to be 4 feet of water where they are now," Hines said. "So they need to get out of there."

Empty coastal highways and small towns were blasted with wind-swept rain. A metal hurricane evacuation route sign along one road wagged violently in the wind, and clumps of cattle huddled in fields.

Steve Rinard, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Lake Charles, said he could not keep count of the tornado warnings across southern Louisiana. "They were just popping up like firecrackers," he said.

Rita threatened dozens of shuttered refineries and chemical plants along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast that represent a quarter of the nation's oil refining capacity. Environmentalists warned of the risk of a toxic spill, and business analysts said Rita could cause already-high gasoline prices to rise to as much as $4 a gallon.

In the storm's cross-hairs were the marshy towns along the Louisiana line: Port Arthur, a city of about 58,000 where the main industries include oil, shrimping and crawfishing; and Beaumont, a port city of about 114,000 that was the birthplace of the modern oil industry. It was in Beaumont that the Spindletop well erupted in a 100-foot gusher in 1901 and gave rise to such giants as Gulf, Humble and Texaco.

Kandy Huffman had no way to leave, and she pushed her broken-down car down the street to her home with plans to ride out the storm in an otherwise-deserted Port Arthur, where the streetlights were turned off and stores were boarded up.

"This isn't my first rodeo. All you can do is pray for best," she said as a driving rain started to fall. "We're surrounded by the people we love. Even if we have to all cuddle up, we know where everybody is."

In New Orleans, which had just drained nearly all the putrid floodwaters from Katrina, Rita's wind and rain sent water gushing through a patched levee along the Industrial Canal and into the already-devastated Lower Ninth Ward and parts of neighboring St. Bernard Parish.

Published: Saturday, September 24, 2005
NEW YORK (AP) Wall Street rallied to finish mostly higher Friday, capping off the week with two days of gains as Hurricane Rita lost strength and raised hopes that its impact on key Gulf Coast refineries wouldn't be as bad as initially feared.

With Rita headed for the Texas coastline the heart of U.S. oil production investors had braced for a repeat of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina last month. By Friday afternoon, however, Rita weakened two notches to a Category 3 hurricane, sending oil prices down more than $2 and easing the mood on Wall Street.

But trading volume remained light while traders kept an eye on the storm, projected to strike the Texas-Louisiana border early Saturday morning. And despite a drop in energy prices, the Dow Jones industrial average posted a small loss Friday.

At the close of trading, the Dow dropped 2.46, or 0.02 percent, to 10,419.59, after sliding as much as 49.75 in early activity.

The broader stock indicators moved higher. The Standard & Poor's 500 index rose 0.67, or 0.06 percent, to 1,215.29, and the Nasdaq gained 6.06, or 0.29 percent, to 2,116.84.

Bonds finished lower, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury note rising to 4.25 percent from 4.18 percent Thursday

Rita downgraded to Category 1
Sat Sep 24, 2005 10:47 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hurricane Rita was downgraded to a Category 1 storm on Saturday with maximum sustained winds of about 75 mph (120 kph), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in its 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) advisory.

The storm's slow movement was expected to generate very heavy rains over the next few days, with rainfall totals of 10 to 15 inches possible across eastern Texas...western Louisiana and southern Arkansas, the center said.

TANZANIA FARM OUT RNS:

Aminex PLC, the oil and gas company listed on the London and Irish Stock Exchanges, today announces that it has completed an agreement with East Coast Energy Ltd. of Canada and its wholly-owned Tanzanian subsidiary Pan-African Tanzania Ltd. ('PAT') to farm out part of the Nyuni Production Sharing Agreement 'PSA') offshore Tanzania, subject to formal approval of the Tanzanian
authorities.

http://moneyextra.uk-wire.com/cgi-bin/articles/200509260700127135R.html

Shame, did it need farming out?

With a global shortage of oil rigs perhaps this is the way forward. PAT must think there's good reason to join up (as they own the land next door) and Aminex would be able to "share" their pipeline in the event of success. Perhaps not so bad!

Hi All,

The farm out also allows Aminex to concentrate resources on other areas of Tanzania, and of course, DPRK.

Cheers,
PM