Hello and welcome to the latest London South East Investor Evening, 12 March 2019, where we bring you investment opportunities and independent analysis from Brewers Hall in the City of London.
Our Oil & Gas themed evening brought together three interesting companies making their investment case: Jadestone Energy’s Paul Blakeley, President & CEO kicked off the evening by giving us their guidance for 2019. Paul told us there aren’t so many AIM-listed oil & gas companies working in the Asia Pacific region, fewer still with a strategy of buying producing oil and gas assets and extracting oil and gas at lower cost. Because they are producing oil they have significant revenue streams and can afford a busy and fully funded work programme up until 2021.
See Paul speak at: 5:30
Next up was the seasoned campaigner Jeremy Asher, Chairman & CEO of Tower Resources who are preparing to drill in shallow waters off Cameroon in 2019. The Thali block has had previous seismic and exploration work done by Total, and Tower is currently organising funding for the Njonji well, what will be an exciting production opportunity close to existing infrastructure.
See Jeremy speak at: 39:26
John Wood, CEO, and Arun Raman, Non-Executive Director were to have given a joint presentation but John was called away at the last moment. Arun talked us through what has been a very busy time for the team with great progress being made on the County Antrim natural gas storage project planned for Islandmagee. The plan is to store natural gas underground in salt caverns, releasing it to the market as appropriate.
To summarise Arun, #INFA’s current focus is to sort out an Equity Partner and a Debt provider, with perhaps a 35/65% split between the two, and to commission an EPC partner, all in parallel. Good progress is being made on all fronts.
See Arun speak at: 1:11:52
Last but far from least is Richard Slape, for many years a respected oil and gas analyst in the AIM market and now a consultant for Hopeton Petroleum. Latterly he was in charge of Business Development at Rockhopper and on the board at Lansdowne Oil and Gas. Richard’s topic was a broad one: what has he learned about oil and gas investing over his 30 year career? Well he didn’t disappoint. Work just as hard at avoiding losers as finding winners; don’t use Pmean but focus on the P50 number, also don’t follow geological chances of success but look for the (lower) commercial chance of success. Getting to know and trust management is critical as companies are often designed in the image of the CEO. And pay particular attention to risk as companies tend to downplay the risk aspects of a project.
See Richard speak at: 1:41:00
City Index sponsored the evening, so our thanks to them and to all our speakers who gave their time to inform and entertain us.
