RE: Maybe someone with access can post up?5 Sep 2021 08:02
The Times Article
Falcon price gushes after find
Investor bulletin boards can be a cruel place. Just last month, a frustrated Falcon Oil and Gas shareholder posted a barb that the company “couldn’t find gas in a Mexican restaurant”.
Well, somebody is choking on their refried beans now. On Friday, Falcon shares doubled on the news that its partner, Origin, had indeed found gas at its Amungee well in the Beetaloo basin in Australia’s Northern Territory.
Drill results suggest a normalised gas flow rate between 5.2 million and 5.8 million cubic feet of gas a day. Recently analysts speculated gas flows greater than three million cubic feet per day were needed to commercialise Beetaloo. The stock price was a gusher.
The share has a big Irish following, largely because Falcon is what John Craven did after he sold Cove Energy to PTT, Thailand’s national energy company, for $1.9 billion (€1.6 billion). Cove made a lot of Irish retail investors a lot of money. While Craven stood down as its chairman some years back, there is still a lot of messiah money in Falcon.
As exploration stocks go, its geology has been rock solid. Its geopolitics have been a little more tricky. Falcon is fracking for gas in lands that were owned by indigenous Australians. A moratorium followed by inquiry followed by a pandemic starved investors of news flow and the share price has drifted badly. Even after last Friday’s jump, it is a way off the 35p price target of stockbroker Cenkos.
On Friday, Philip O’Quigley, Falcon’s chief executive, said that the results put Beetaloo on “a par with other shale gas basins in North America”. Santos, an Australian oil company, is drilling next to Amungee. If it validates the results, then Falcon will be one step closer to the promised land.