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Gold/Mining/Energy : Strictly: Drilling and oil-field services -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Douglas V. Fant who wrote (45733)	6/1/1999 10:13:00 PM
From: Crimson Ghost	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

Doug: You must be a good tech stock picker. The NASDAQ was hit hard today. This is the second consecutive trading session that the OSX has held up well in the face of skidding crude quotations. Increases my conviction that we will see new OSX highs before long.

To: Douglas V. Fant who wrote (45733)	6/1/1999 11:20:00 PM
From: Tomas	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 95453

OIL: Drive to cut drilling costs - Financial Times, June 2 By Robert Corzine A drive to expand the use of finder wells, a relatively cheap alternative to conventional oil exploration wells, is to be launched next month as exploration activity in the North Sea continues to wane. The government and industry are to hold seminars in Aberdeen and London to promote the concept of finder wells, which some industry experts believe can reduce drilling costs by more than a third compared with conventional wells. Advocates hope the wider use of the new technology will encourage greater exploration activity. It fell sharply after the collapse in world crude oil prices, and has yet to recover in spite of a price rally in the past few months. Arthur Andersen, the consultancy, says the number of exploration and appraisal wells that have begun drilling this year is about half that in the same period in 1998. If the decline in exploration wells persists it will have a knock-on effect on the rest of the oil industry, which directly and indirectly supports about 370,000 jobs. Although seismic technology has cut the risk of drilling dry holes, three-quarters of exploration wells are likely to fail to find oil or natural gas in commercial quantities. Fewer exploration wells will probably mean fewer discoveries, and fewer field development projects on which the onshore part of the industry depends. The cost of a conventional exploration well represents about $2 of the $13-a-barrel life cycle cost of an average North Sea field. The lower costs of a finder well are mainly due to reductions in the amount of data collected during drilling, using smaller bore sizes and by simplifying the well design. Advocates argue that savings in a multi-well drilling programme can be about 30 per cent using current technology, although they admit that perhaps one in 10 such wells may not reach its objective.