RE: Really Good RNS - Oversold and Over Reaction3 Jun 2026 05:29
#QHE From Mike Stally (sorry cannot post tgm link on here)
Haven’t had a chance to digest it properly yet, been a long 24 hours of travelling and I’m shattered, but I understand the reaction somewhat. The market’s fickle as we know and they didn’t really give the stellar announcement everyone was hoping for.. so the people on the fence have probably thrown in the towel from a risk perspective.
So here my initial take, which I’ll dig a little more into later/tomorrow when I’ve had a chance to catch up. But basically, the near well-bore damage has been cleared which is great (was a big risk), but perhaps they didn’t see the wider reservoir gushing into the well - this could suggest the Leadville here is a bit tighter (porosity wise) than they were expecting. I would guess the flow rates showed commerciality, but maybe on the lower end of the scale (although not strictly the case, they could be flowing quite well too).
Considering the initial plan wasn’t to frack, the fact they feel this is a worth perusing is really encouraging, for a couple of reasons.. firstly you don’t throw money at a dead horse. This is an expensive business, every day is cost and the specialised equipment to do the fracking will add more to that.
Secondly, they’ve got some good data and see wider pressure from the reservoir is there (from the pressure build up tests - that was a great snippet from the RNS), but it’s just struggling to get through, so by blowing deeper holes they feel this will open everything up (this is why I’m getting the hint that the rock is maybe a little more dense than expected, or it could be the damage settled further out than they expected too, it’s been there for 30+ years after all).
From all the research I’ve done on the paradox basin, acid treatment and fracking is highly effective. Acid only gets so far and has done its job on the near wellbore damage (and actually a little further than expected), now they want to blow open the wider reservoir with a sand/water blast, which permeates further into the system. If the system is tighter than they thought, then this will hopefully open up bigger pockets and increase the flow rates.
I’ve only read the RNS twice but I feel it’s quite positive to be honest - the data sounds really encouraging. The thing people are probably missing is they want to define as much as the resource NOW, as they possible can - this will all feed into the updated reserves report. This and the fact they’re not giving preliminary flow rates is hinting to me they might already be in discussions with someone. So they need this test to be as comprehensive as possible - blowing wider into the reservoir has the potential to pump up those flow rates quite a bit. It wasn’t the initial plan, but they’re reacting to the data in front of them which is good to hear.