Member Info for Blubay

Slight change of focus there. They will look at the logs down to the current TD and then decide whether to 'drill deeper', that's why they are postponing decision on the rig move

Interview is up now, worth dissecting what she says as about the drill at the beginning

As you will have seen from Noble, there is no prediction of heavy rains and the early season looks particularly dry this year at the moment. It's the later long rains that would be of more concern. The judgement call to drill Itumbula this season will be much more about the results at TaiC, and whether to spend the remaining funds on casing and appraising the well they've just drilled instead.

I think you've misunderstood/interpreted LW.

1. encountering fracture so close to top of basement is potentially more of a bonus, if they can access basement gas reserves with sufficient porosity in that layer then happy days and no need to drill deeper

2. you can never rule out mechanical hitches in deep drilling, but there is no indication of such at all

3. you're repeating a piece of FUD news about background levels that doesn't have any bearing on actual gas sampling, which we need to wait for

4. we'll see how the day goes, I imagine she has a lot on there

The market no-one can predict. You were waiting for result to decide whether to invest, so I guess you will continue to wait until those results are independently confirmed

It's advisable not to filter anyone on these discussion boards or you end up in an echo chamber that mirrors your prejudices and might inadvertently affect your investment choices. The whole point of these boards is that you get a sense of which way the winds of market sentiment might be blowing.

Horult - I don't like mindless ramping either, but to be fair there were no major issues on this drill, just minor glitches that were resolved. They have done very well to reach TD with both target gas shows and sufficient well integrity to test these at all target levels right down to basement. That's a huge achievement and meets the planned objective of the drill, so in that sense it is 'as planned'.

You can't possibly be "100% certain" of something for which you have no evidence. Yes, there are multiple helium shows at all target levels. Yes, if they can safely pull out of the hole then there is the opportunity to test these. Yes, it's very positive and exciting. No, we don't know if there is a discovery until we can test.

Interesting also that we can trace the wording of the article to a particular posting on this forum...

Interesting that there have a been a few of these trolling/short report articles placed in that newspaper

The company's Chief Financial Officer is actually based in Tanzania, with 15+ years experience in the region. He was previously Financial Director for Tata East Africa region.

Yes Pete, they do. Look at the board membership and their experience in country/region. The board was completely restructured to weight expertise in finance and in commercialisation. They also rebranded the company website last week to position themselves as a future 'producer' of helium gas. There is also a development concept for production on slide 25 of the September investor presentation, with indicative costs. I thought it was perhaps a bit premature but they may know more than we do...

Not really, as the accumulated gas concentrations could be hugely different in different sample locations, according to the seepage and trapping in different structures. Any kind of commercial discovery will certainly de-risk the whole basin to some extent and hopefully that will be the case at Tai or Mbelele or both.

Yeah, that's exactly what I took the RNS to imply (as explained below)

Pete - certainly there will be a cash raise at some point, question is when and what the SP is. No-one's going to complain if the next raise is at 12-15p :-) . They were funded to complete two drills to make a major discovery before Christmas, plus another six months working capital (e.g. to June 2024). Commercial appraisal was then pencilled for phase two on the GANNT chart, after Christmas, but wasn't part of the cashbox raise. If this well is transformative they might decide to switch the remaining short term funds from drilling Itumbula onto early appraisal of TaiC.

Yes mj, what has changed is that they've hit a fracture very near the top of the basement rock. If opening up that fracture is directly conducting gas from a deeper trap reservoir then happy days. On the other hand, they now have to carefully avoid creating any risks to well integrity/collapse/flooding. As Joe says, 'IF' the issue is caused by venting helium rich gas under pressure from basement then boomtime, that creates new well management challenges. They have the right kit on this well to manage that cautiously but they may have to go slow in the process.

It means what it says. It will take some time to carefully clean up and safely pull out of hole at Tai3, and they have decided to complete the tests on that well before deciding whether to rig up directly at Itumbula, rather than moving the rig while the wire line is being done. There are various interpretations. It's certainly possible that they are thinking about keeping the drill there to case the 8.5" section well for appraisal and production. It's also possible the remaining cash runway for Itumbula is now shorter than they would like, due to the delays. In which case they might want to look at a quick fundraise on the back of claiming discovery at TaiC.

Not necessarily, the partial loss of fluids is potentially very good news if they've hit a gas conducting fracture zone at the top of the basement without having to drill deeper. If that's the case then avoiding any risk to well integrity is now the priority so they can try and sample it.

Lots of early de-risking to sell on news around placement price 6p. It will take a while again with no news to test for possible discovery so there will always be money that moves out of investment during the speculation gap (as we're very familiar with). Hard to get a good sense of SP response early in the day.

Yes, that's broadly my interpretation. I'm just looking for clarity and alternative interpretations. The judgement call is that it is a sufficient depth at which to safely wire the basement target for structure and to sample helium?

Great news on getting everything running and finished within a week, and accessing all of the target zones with helium shows. I also understand the decision to call TD at the fracture zone. But can anyone explain the references to depth here (I'm assuming it's not a typo as it's there twice in the RNS)? Did they really drill only 3 meters further before making the call, rather then the 100m or so anticipated?

Previous RNS - "Well depth is currently at 1,445m measured depth ("MD"), with well total depth ("TD") now expected to be at ~1,550m MD"

New RNS - Tai-3 well has successfully reached a TD of 1,448m measured depth ("MD") having encountered weathered crystalline Basement

We know they encountered weathered metamorphic material by the time they got to 1445, and now they have drilled "into crystalline Basement" three meters deeper?