I've mentioned Independent Oil & Gas positively several times recently both in the blog and on the podcast and they issued an excellent RNS on Monday confirming progress.

As anticipated, they announced the completion of the farm-out transaction with CalEnergy Resources and the final investment decision on phase 1 of the core project, comprising 410 billion cubic feet of 2P+2C reserves and resources across six discovered UK Southern North Sea gas fields.  The core project is projected to deliver over half a billion pounds in pre-tax cash flow net to IOG and, with the shares still trading below the 20p offered by RockRose Energy (more on them later), I think there's still quite a lot to go for with IOG.

Not such good news for shareholders at Reabold Resources, unfortunately.  Certain legal and administrative issues have caused a delay in entering into a binding equity swap agreement with the Rathlin shareholders. Indeed, after completing a 24 million pound placing in anticipation, they now say there can be no assurance that the proposed equity swap will even be completed. 

The shares fell below the 0.9p placing price on the news, but somehow I don't think that will be of much concern to many who took part in the placing, who are suspected to simply have been covering short positions taken out at much higher prices. 

It's bad news though for those who paid up to 1.75p in all the manufactured excitement and now have lost half their money and, ironically, many will have bought their shares from those who were forward short selling in anticipation of the placing, even later leaking news of it to force the share price down further for maximum profit.  The worst thing is, this seems to happen every time there's a placing at Reabold, which is quite often.

I3 Energy has become another leaky ship.  Its shares rose over 50% in the 3 days before the announcement of the Serenity oil discovery.  Anyway, it was a strong announcement and nearly doubled the share price before the details started to be examined. 

The concern is that progression of the reserve-based lending facility necessary to develop Liberator will require successful drilling at Liberator and the Company is obligated to enter this facility no later than December 2019 in order to remain in compliance with the terms of its junior loan note facility.  

On the bright side, RockRose Energy also issued an RNS noting the announcement made by I3E and stating that it will be working to understand fully the implications for the Tain development project in which RockRose has a 50% interest, including the possible impact on potentially recoverable volumes.  This, of course, has led to takeover speculation and what can be said with certainty is that the I3 share price will remain highly volatile.

Finally, Columbus Energy Resources announced the grant of Ministry approval for its Saffron prospect spud.  The well is targeting 77 million barrels of oil and is expected to take approximately 30 to 45 days to complete and evaluate.  With a market cap of 31 million, it's worth checking out.  There could be some upside here.

Moving on, news from all the other companies who have made announcements so far this week will be covered in the Sunday blog and I'll be back on Saturday with another podcast focussed on whatever interesting looking news comes out in the meantime.