Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions). And we will go first today to Michael Jacobs with Tudor, Pickering, Holt.
Michael Jacobs – Tudor, Pickering, Holt
Good morning, everybody.
Chuck Davidson
Good morning, Michael.
Michael Jacobs – Tudor, Pickering, Holt
Chuck, just thinking about your exploration success over the last three years, can you offer some color on when you expect to sanction major projects and book reserves over the next three years and potentially quantify what bookings could look like through 2012?
Chuck Davidson
Well let me just give you just a broad guideline in terms of where we see things going and also maybe a little bit of a discussion on how reserves get booked for these projects. The first one that is up for sanction is Benita and as we discussed hopefully by midyear we will have that sanctioned by the company partners and the government. That leads to initial reserve booking but especially in these international projects, you will see initial bookings that are based on the data you have at hand and then as you see performance you will continue to add resources and moving them into proven reserves. So our view is on many of these especially where we’ve drilled top of structure, got good seismic data, but at least under the SEC guidelines that we have been operating under for many of the past years, we would say that we will make some initial bookings that will continue to increase over a period of I would say at least two to four years following initial production.
So again in West Africa, I think that will be the key project. We will have some tiebacks that at some point will be sanctioned into Benita. Keep in mind there is Diega and that we just mentioned the Carmen discovery, those are likely to follow, we wait for the initial project and then move those on. The gas projects, we have spaced out, and we would not expect any of those to sanction – I'm talking about the gas projects in West Africa, we wouldn't expect those to sanction in 2009. Again those are going to be later years and that will depend on how we put together the development plan, whether we decide for instance to cycle one of those projects, to strip out liquids, in which case we would book the liquids but not the gas. And then later as the market is in place for the gas and there is an outlook for the gas, we would sanction that part of the project and book it.
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