Email from de28 Oct 2015 17:11
Hi Chris... love where you are taking this but I can say, after 35 yrs of doing this, it is difficult to assess the value of any asset and what the market will reward for it. I wouldn't spend too much time in trying to figure it out... let me explain
Not all barrels are the same in terms of value. We evaluate fields on a very technical and commercial in-depth modelling and our models are extremely sophisticated. As you know it is not just the production of the well but also the decline rate as you well know all oil fields go on decline in the very early life of the well. The next question is what is the operating costs and following that we look at the fiscal terms governing the production cashflow. In North America there is a royalty scheme where the govt get's its share. Indonesia is governed by an Production Sharing agreement where the company supplies the capital and expertise and in return retain a percentage of the gross production. The advantage of the PSC system is that even though we would only receive, say % of the gross production but we recover all our costs from the govt share. So for fields on production, and for CEB it is why we are focusing our attention on farm ins for a work program because we would immediately be getting those costs returned from the govt share, the next month actually. The net amount of capital we have to raise will be the gross capital less what we get in return from the cost recovery pool generated by production.
The last and the most important factor is assessing the value of production in Indonesia is the oil price and quite frankly no one knows where that is going however, history has shown that oil prices are a function a huge swings depending on the supply demand picture. What is interesting to know is that the world's oil demand has made the largest jump in 2015 in history. Here we go again, high prices cause huge investment in the shale oil play in the US (which have been carrying close to $0.300 trillion in debt) then based on the glut in production the demand gets out of control, prices drop, major oil companies cut investment and low and behold, supply drops and the demand side takes time to react as people must change their lifestyles to a certain extent so demand continues and supply drops and when the first buyer of a crude ship has to bid for it in competition with others, then the oil price kicks up as quick as it dropped.
Anyway, hope you found this helpful, it would be wrong to give you any comments on the content of your assessment so good luck with it all. Cheers Dave