I remember buying 10000 shares at 40 cents prior to the Opito drill around 2001-2. Opito was another big drill and thrill but came up dry and the SP dropped back to 25 cents. I had sold half prior to the drill, but after further evaluation -or should I say intuition- I bought another 20k at 28 cents. The joke was that NOG (as they were called in those days) was out of cash after the Opito drill, and were trying to raise money with an issue at 34 cents which was at a substantial premium to the market price. It might have suted some institutions, who may have topped up or averaged down, but who would buy at a premium?
Anyway the next year (2003) they discovered Tui, to not much fanfare I should say as it ws considered too small to be economic. The Tui field was, in fact, three seperate drills, Tui, Pateke, and ? (can anyone remember). It was only after the third drill that the economies to develop the field looked good and the rest is history.
In my humble opinion there is still plenty of oil out in the Taranaki basin for the finding and more drill and thrill to come. But beware of the downrampers, the naysayers, the doomsday merchants and the fainthearted. You have to have faith to ride out the dusters because there will be more dusters than discoveries.
One day someone is going to drill and find an "elephant" of an oil field out in the Taranaki Basin.
Could it be Hoki?:D