There's no 30 minutes of waffle and paid-for opinion in this oil and gas podcast, just 3 minutes or so of fact-based reality, so let's start with Rose Petroleum, which announced an 85% reduction of their Paradox acreage from around 80,000 acres to 12,000 acres to save on annual lease rental costs. They still retain the key drill site, but Rose is already in this deal on a promoted basis, paying 100% of the well cost for a 75% interest in the acreage, so although they talk about it, it's difficult to see a further farm-out. And since previous management couldn't raise the funds to drill this project, why should the new? The current management talk of new deals, but still have no details - and the big unanswered question, of course, is how are they going to raise the finance both for any new ventures and for Paradox? On to more positive matters, 88 Energy announced it had executed a rig contract for the upcoming drilling of the Charlie-1 appraisal well on the Central North Slope in Alaska. The spud of the well is planned for February 2020. Currently, this is the only major financed drill coming up and it should attract a lot of attention, particularly with the huge numbers being touted. They're claiming an unrisked prospective oil resource totalling a gross mean of 1.6 billion barrels of oil in all the horizons they expect Charlie-1 to intersect, of which 480 million barrels of oil is the net means to 88E. There was a placement last month of 540 million shares at an equivalent of 0.7p and, once those shares have churned, I would expect this to start moving higher UK Oil & Gas announced the successful completion of HH-2 coring operations at Horse Hill. The 240 ft core has clearly identified the Portland reservoir's most productive zone or "sweet spot", the most porous and permeable vertical zone within the oil pool, which will now be the target of the planned 1,000 m HH-2z horizontal trajectory, expected to commence next week, which will be drilled wholly within the most oil productive part of the Portland, the zone capable of delivering the most significant flow rates. UKOG Log samples The core is now at a laboratory, where a geological and petrophysical analysis is underway and results of analyses that directly impact the field's possible increased oil in place and recoverable oil volumes will be reported soon. So far, UKOG has been delivering strong announcements ahead of schedule and all is looking good for a strong move upwards in the share price before the end of the year. Finally, Tower Resources announced another placing at the lowest price yet of 0.325p. Drilling of the NJOM-3 well is entirely dependent on a farm-out, but with the Chairman & CEO putting up nearly half of the £1.5 million being raised, he must be fairly confident. It's a gamble, but I'd say not a bad bet. 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.