I believe we're live and rolling. Welcome, everybody, and good morning, and thank you for joining us today for our strategic review webinar. My name is Emma Alexander, and I'm the Investor Relations Manager at Strike. I'd like to welcome you to this session and thank you all for your time and continued interest in the company. I'm joined today by our newly appointed CEO, Peter Stokes, our Chair, John Poynton, and our recently appointed Chief Financial Officer, Tim Cooper. We'd like to take this chance to formally welcome Peter and Tim and introduce them to you all. Shortly, I'll hand over to John to introduce the session. Thank you to those who have pre-submitted their questions online. We hope we can address a lot of these in the session itself, but I will also host a short Q&A with the remaining time at the end.
Please feel free to submit your questions via the Q&A box. If they're not answered, I'm always available afterwards for a phone call, and you can direct any questions through me. I'll hand over now to John to kick things off.
Many thanks, Emma. Hello, everyone. And on behalf of the Board and my colleagues, thank you for joining us today. We certainly appreciate the questions you've asked, and hopefully, some of our comments will cover those. But as Emma says, we'll conduct a short Q&A at the end of this. Let me start by acknowledging the frustration you feel over the last sort of six , 12 months about the performance of the company and the market. As a Board and as fellow significant shareholders, we share that frustration and disappointment, and we take our roles as irectors and management very seriously in terms of trying to redress that. Hence the reason for this webinar today, to explain in as much detail as we can within the constraints of disclosure obligations to the ASX, what's been happening behind the scenes, and answer some of the questions that you've rightly posed.
Perhaps we can start with the speculation that was in the media the other day about the Carlyle Group. I think quite a few people have asked, well, what was that all about? Was there a bid? What was the nature of the discussions with the Carlyle Group? You would have seen that there was speculation around Santos and Carlyle. Indeed, the quality of the journalism in that story was not particularly strong, which should have, I guess, alluded all of us to the fact that there was not a lot of accuracy in the speculation. I just want to confirm that no stage in anything resembling a bid, offer, a serious discussion with Carlyle ever happened. From our point of view, there was no obligation to tell anyone anything because there was nothing to say.
Clearly, if that had been, we would have very much executed what we needed to do in terms of a release to the market. I just wanted to put that to bid. There was no bid. There was no deep discussion regarding a takeover for Strike. I'm sure some people might ask some more questions about that, and I'm happy to answer them if I can. I think the next most important item is clearly the strategic review. There's been a lot of discussion about why we did that, what was the context, why it took so long, and what the outcome was, which for many people appears to be just business as usual. It's worth stepping back, going back, I suppose, not just to the disappointment around South Erregulla, but indeed the situation we found ourselves in after the AGM and at the start of this year.
We had some issues with some counterparty relationships. We'd seen unexpectedly our Joint Venture partner pounce on, sweep on, if you like, the Mineral Resources assets to the north of us. Whilst we were tracking towards what we thought was a very orderly development of the West Erregulla assets with Hancock, when they did that, they had a whole different agenda, which was completely beyond our control. That was to assess the nature, the size, the prospectivity of those new assets they acquired and how they were going to monetize them. They wanted initially to determine the scale of the reserves they were required to, in fact, drill a couple more wells. They were looking at where they might locate the plant, whether it was originally where we planned or somewhere else.
We found ourselves in a situation where we had some issues with external relationships, and we had a Joint Venture partner no longer committed in the same timeframe to developing our most significant asset. That was, I guess, the catalyst for us to then go, okay, what should we be doing? Should we be thinking about selling our major asset? Should we find an alternate pathway to the development of it, potentially trying to develop that ourselves outside of Hancock? Anyway, you can imagine that it was quite a tumultuous time for us, a difficult time. We took the opportunity as a Board to engage external facilitators. I think it's important to say that Oliver Wyman didn't actually conduct the strategic review. They facilitated our management team and Board doing that.
Indeed, we spent a lot of time as Board and management going through the strategic priorities that we already felt we had, but that were confirmed by Oliver Wyman. I guess at the same time, we felt that it was time to change the senior management team. In fact, we've made some other changes since then, and I'll be happy to introduce Peter and Tim in a minute. We felt that it was a total reset time. I think a few people have felt that there was this hiatus period for that four or five months where we weren't doing anything. We were very fortunate to have Jill Hoffmann, who's a seasoned oil and gas executive, come and act as CEO and an Executive Director and, in a way, steady the ship in that time of uncertainty.
She helped us with the focus of the strategic plan on identifying where we should go forward and what priority we should give to each of our assets. I think it's a little unfair to say that the ship was perhaps rudderless at that time because it wasn't. In fact, Jill and Nev, who regrettably can't be with us today, were pivotal in getting a reset of a number of our external relationships to the point now where they're vastly more productive than they were before. I think it's important that we just really do dig into that. I'm happy to answer any additional questions. It was about the determination of the Board to understand exactly what options we had and how we could then best unlock the value that we had in our asset base.
I think as time's gone on, we've certainly seen more recently some of our, if you like, premises confirmed by recent media where the government is now confirming that they're short of gas, confirming they're going to be short of electricity. I guess we, during that period of the review, felt that that was something that they would come to, that penny would drop. In that sense, it's a reset, but it's a confirmation of things that we inherently believe to be true being confirmed by the Government and the bureaucrats within government. I think we're very encouraged by that. As recently as the weekend, we've had the Minister for Energy confirming that there needs to be more gas-fired power in Western Australia. Certainly, the users of gas for feedstock are still very keen to make sure there's sufficient gas.
I think it is, and I'm happy to, as I said, talk more detail about that process. Hopefully, that gives you some sense that, one, it isn't business as usual. We didn't suddenly spend all that time, frankly, not a lot of money, but all that time just to come back with, "Oh, well, we're just going to keep doing what we've been doing." There was a fundamental reset and a strong determination to go forward in an environment where we think there are now tailwinds supporting what we want to do. We actually believe now that we can advance West Erregulla. We've got a very productive now relationship with our Joint Venture partner who are confirming that they also want to develop that asset.
There is still some question about where the plant may be located or indeed whether, in fact, we might want to go ahead and, what they call, equity uplift our own gas. Certainly, the relationship with Hancock is now very productive and is giving us great confidence that we can now monetize that very significant asset. We can answer some other questions about the other assets we have, and I'm happy to do that. In the meantime, I think I'm delighted to introduce you to our newly appointed CEO, Peter Stokes, a seasoned executive with lots and lots of experience. He can speak to our forward plan soon.
Part of releasing the strategic review in the manner that we did was to help reset expectations and allow a platform for the new management team, including Tim, to set their own targets and their own timelines and ones they believe are achievable and be accounted for or they can be accountable for. I think Tim will talk also to one of the clear outcomes of the review, that the critical challenge we have is our asset base exceeds our funding capacity. You could probably argue the market has been marking us down because it believes we're going to do an equity raising quite soon. We have significant opportunities and a fantastic asset base. Something that we acknowledge is that we need to fund some of those assets.
We are certainly working through, and hence the idea of having a CFO resident in Western Australia able to spend full time on those challenges. Tim can talk to that later. I think probably that is all I need to say at the moment, just other than to reaffirm our optimism about the future, notwithstanding the way the market has been treating us. I am going to hand over to Peter now to talk through his view of the strategy and then Tim after that and come back and answer as many questions as we all can at the end of that. Thank you.
Thanks, John. Thank you for having me at this first meeting. I'm really delighted to be leading Strike now. I think I've had the opportunity over the last couple of weeks to review the strategic review with both the Board and the management team. I've also spent a couple of days across our operations last week, which I'll go into a little bit further. As you've heard from John, the last five months have been a lot more than just a strategy review. It's really been firming in the foundations of Strike and also developing or redeveloping some of the critical relationships we need to develop some of our key assets. We're now heading into a new phase of Strike with a really structured, focused way forward.
I'm really delighted to have the opportunity to lead and ultimately be accountable for this with the management team that we've now got. I'll talk you through some of the strategy that we have going forward. John alluded to a key part of that, which is the gas-to-power strategic positioning of the business. Those of you who've been following the West Australian Government announcements over the last couple of weeks would see very clear endorsement of that strategy around gas-to-power generation that we've embarked on from early or middle of last year onwards.
The latest announcements from AEMO, the ESU, last week really strongly enforced the role of gas, both in supporting grid reliability, but also the requirement, as John talked about, for industrial customers in the sector who still need significant gas, and also underpin the government's concept of the built-in WA approach, which is a critical part for the Western Australian government to continue to support investment in major infrastructure in the West. I think underpinning that critically is discipline to deliver these projects in a structured way, deliver them to the timeframes that we've committed to, and ensure that we get the power generation up and running as planned in the second half of next year.
Importantly, we also want to retain some of the operational optionality that we have around the portfolio, so picking and prioritizing gas processing, setting pathways that make the most sense for us, and ensuring that we're bringing online power generation where it makes sense, whether that be peaking or mid-merit plants as we look further down the path for the business. If I now move to West Erregulla, you heard from John that the last five months have really been rigorously testing the path forward for this asset, both building the relationship with Hancock, understanding some of their intention around what they want to do given their new acquisition of the MinRes resources further to the north of us, and really building a strong alignment for that Joint Venture as we take that forward.
Certainly, in my short time here, my sense is that we are well aligned and are working towards a constructive way to build this project out, however both organizations choose to then use the gas that's produced. In parallel with working through this, we've been looking at the ways that we then monetize the downstream assets to including gas-to-power generation, which is clearly underpinned by strong market signals and a requirement which has been really become very clear from the WA Government's AUD 7 billion energy infrastructure commitment just a couple of weeks ago, and then followed by the AEMO ESOO last week, which have really confirmed what we believe strongly that there's a need for flexible dispatchable gas in the West Australian market. Being so strongly aligned to the government's priorities really gives us confidence around the strategy that we've adopted.
I think many West Australians probably understood that that was required, and it has really only become very clear to the Government most recently. I think to John's point, one of the things we want to try and do here as well is address some of the questions that we have been asked since releasing the strategic review last week. In that context, I will go to Erregulla Deep first and the Natta 3D work that we have been having processed recently. While the well was drilled last year and initial testing was done, it has been clear that we in the Perth Basin, it is critical that we have the integration with the new Natta 3D seismic data to really give us confidence around the subsurface conditions.
The 3D was acquired in two stages, and I can confirm now that we've had the fast track for the second part of that, but only in the last week or two. These are typical 3D processing timelines. While we'd hoped to have some of the data earlier, we've only just got that now, and the subsurface team is now working through that. We are focused on ensuring that the technical work that we're doing is really robust and reliable and that we're confident in the results and share that with the market as soon as practical. As I said, I was up last week at the South Erregulla site, and we sent out in the strategic review some of the recent photos of the pad being built for the 85-megawatt peaker, which is progressing well.
The last of those pours happened over the weekend, and the shed will start to get built over the next few weeks. We're still targeting first generation by early October, if not earlier next year. The modeling that we have is based on somewhere between 20-30% capacity factor being a peaking power plant. We're also looking at how we might increase this. We've started to review the potential for an additional 15-megawatt expansion. They're in the early stages of looking at that at the moment as we explore how that might fit into the market as well. The facility that we have there will allow easy expansion to cover that as well. The other area where we had a few questions was Walyering, and it continues to generate stable cash flows producing 25 terajoules a day.
It is still a key valuable foundation for the business and on track to produce the revenues that we had expected for the current financial year that just concluded over the weekend. We received a few questions around the Walyering East well that was drilled last year. The well did intercept gas-charged sands in the lower section of the CCM, but its location from both the processing plant and the requirement for a pipeline that would cross the highway means we really need to review both the cost and logistical challenges. We worked that through, but we are certainly focused on seeing how we can build out that gas field and continue to extend the life of the Walyering plant there. At Ocean Hill, we understand there has been some strong interest about what we are doing at Ocean Hill and what is next.
Our internal view is that it is a compelling position or opportunity that we have there, and we're really excited about where Ocean Hill might take us with similar properties of gas there to Walyering, which will enable relatively easy exploitation into the pipelines that are quite adjacent. Our focus is on how we move this project forward and how we maximize the value and preserve flexibility around gas-to-power generation and/or directing to the pipeline. We want to, as we work this through, and Tim will talk through this a bit more, find the right time to progress Ocean Hill with the right funding that we have under structure and looking at options, how that might look going forward. On that note, I'll hand over to Tim to talk through some of the funding strategy and balance sheet.
Thanks, Peter, and welcome to everyone on the call this morning. It was clear to me coming into the business that Strike holds a very strong portfolio of assets. The challenge really is how to best manage and sequence the development of those assets to generate the greatest return for shareholders. The strategic review, from my perspective and stage of involvement, has been about ensuring that the appropriate work has been completed underpinning the strategic direction that's been shared. A key challenge out of all of that is funding. Therefore, a priority for us out of that strategic review is to strengthen the balance sheet to enable the business to develop its assets and particularly for generating cash flow to support future growth opportunities.
A funding strategy is being developed, which includes options being progressed at the moment and other considerations for strategic and infrastructure partnerships, corporate transactions, and that may well include Joint Venture arrangements as well. An equity raise may be considered in due course when it is value-attributive to do so, but is not the current consideration at the moment. Likewise, a farm out at Ocean Hill or any other asset is not currently a priority and would only be considered in the context of the capital plan in the future and a value proposition that is compelling. We are not ready to come to market with that funding plan today, but it is being developed and is a near-term priority for the business. Of course, we will update shareholders as soon as we can as that plan progresses. Thank you.
Thanks, Tim. Just thank you to Peter and Tim for those comments. Happy to now have Emma facilitate a Q&A. Hopefully, that's answered some of the questions that you might have had. Again, I just want to reinforce our gratitude for the continuing support. I know that it's tested everybody and tested us as well. We appreciate you being on this webinar today. We appreciate the questions. We appreciate your continuing support. We know that it's been a testing time, and hopefully, you'll get the sense from us that we're resetting, we're realigning, we're moving forward. We're still as optimistic about the quality of our assets as we've ever been, in fact, probably more so. We feel like some of the impediments to monetizing those assets are falling away, and happy again to talk a bit more about that. We do have discipline.
We've got a new management team focused and very much accountable for what we do going forward. The Board, as ever, is also fully cognizant of its obligations to deliver value to shareholders. That is what we've been doing or trying to do. Thank you. Over to you, Emma.
Cool. All righty. So we've had some questions come through. I'm just going to address a couple that have come through recently about whether there will be a recording of this webinar posted to the hub. It will be available on the website. You can go to our update section. It might take me a couple of hours to put it up on the site, but it should be up there by the end of today. I might ask the first question of John. There's been a couple of questions that have come through about why the strategic review took five months to just reaffirm the existing strategy. However, I think John's really addressed that in his talk. There is a follow-on one about why hasn't the detailed strategic review been released publicly?
As you can imagine, in reviewing all of these assets and all of the options in great detail, there's quite a lot of commercial and confidence information that is discussed. I think we released as much as we could in the sense that we weren't going to give away any sort of, if you like, secrets to our competitors or our Joint Venture partners. We have had to walk a bit of a fine line about that. I suppose, in a way, in our saying, we've spent that time, we've reviewed, we've had Jill managing the business in the interim, we now have a permanent CEO, a permanent Perth-based CFO, and I think we're saying we've got a very clear view about what we need to do going forward.
I'm not sure if any great detail that we might have, even if it were commercial and confidence, would have assisted anyone having any deeper information than they probably still have now.
Great. Maybe a follow-on that for you as well, John. What has specifically changed in the relationship with Hancock, and why should investors believe that this JV will now deliver?
It's again difficult to go into any great detail, but I received quite a lot of criticism when we made the decision to part ways with our former CEO. I also had subsequent, if you like, comments and questions and very strong views about, well, why did it take so long? There's probably no point whatsoever in going over the detail, but I think if you have a look at the Board and its experience, we didn't take that decision lightly. There were quite a few data points coming back to us as Board members where relationships with our stakeholders, our counterparts, our Joint Venture partners, you name it, the people we needed to deal with had perhaps not become dysfunctional, but were certainly far from as functional as they might have been.
We needed to do something, and we also had the context of the uncertainty surrounding the post-acquisition of the MinRes assets within our Joint Venture partner. Two things have happened. We have got a management reset. We have got a clear view about how to go forward. We have got a much stronger relationship now with Hancock. Indeed, as recently as the last few days, very positive signals around moving together forward to commercialize and monetize the West Erregulla assets. I can tell you a few months ago that was certainly far from the case.
Yeah. Great. I might put this one to Tim. Is the company considering selling down its interest in West Erregulla to fund other priorities?
No. We see value in West Erregulla as our key asset in our vertically integrated business. Working with Hancock towards the best outcome for the Joint Venture, and that includes the best outcome for both participants. For us, we see strong value for that in the business, particularly in that power generation pathway. If there was a situation to arise in the future where we thought there was a better value proposition for their asset, we may consider it. As of right now, the simple answer is no.
Okay. I think Peter mostly covered on this one, but I'll see if he has any extra comments as we've had a few questions come through on why it's taken so long to get an update on Erregulla Deep and what the forward timeline might look like there.
Yep. Thanks, Emma. I think, as I covered in just previously, I think timeline is, as we have expected internally, to get the fast track. The detailed analysis is now underway. Our expectation is that we will have that detail as part of the updated reserves for our year-end results. I think on track, I know people have thought it might be a bit quicker. It's a fairly big data set of 3D analysis. The team for sure will have that over the next couple of months and be able to provide that as part of the reserves.
Moving on to Walyering, we've had quite a few questions come through. Tim, I might direct this one at you as it is to do with funding. Why haven't we tested and tied in Walyering East, and are we hiding poor results there?
No, we're not hiding poor results. Peter touched on it earlier. It was a good intersection to gas there. There are some constraints in a way in relation to its location, its distance, and crossing that major highway. I guess in the context of the broader consideration and sequencing of our assets and value maximization out of each asset, for Walyering, it's a case of just understanding what we need to do when to create the best long-term outcome for that asset. That testing and tying in will do that when it best suits the plan for developing Walyering.
Great. We might head to South Erregulla. We've had some questions on what the—and I'll direct this at Peter—what is the status of the 15-megawatt expansion, and when would this come online?
The 15-megawatt would come online a year after the 85-megawatt. As I said previously, we're targeting October or 1st of October 2026 for the 85 and then October 2027, which would align with the AEMO process where we're applying for that capacity two years out. The network access quantity and then the capacity reserve credits would align with that two-year application. We are working through that process at the moment for that application with that target for two years or for 2027, two years from this October.
Yeah. I think our shareholders will remember that it was a similar—it's exactly the same process that we went through last year. There has been a slight delay this year of a couple of weeks because the AEMO ESOO was actually delayed by a couple of weeks. That is now we're expected to have the outcomes of that process in late November, which will inform a final investment decision after that. I guess another one for Tim, similar into the West Erregulla, will we retain or sell the power station?
The power station currently under development, we would retain that asset. So it's the commercial outcomes of the strategic review in that vertically integrated business. Again, if opportunities present down the track to generate a greater return by divesting a portion of all of that power plant, then we would consider it. At the moment, the plan is to maintain 100% ownership and maximize that return according to our vertically integrated business strategy.
Yeah. All right. We've had a few questions coming through, but there were quite a lot that were pre-submitted. If anybody's got anything extra, feel free to jump on the chat box and send it through. I might point this one at John. Why were there so few updates during the strategic review period?
I've had that posed to me a few times. I think we certainly came out with a quarterly—we were certainly talking to various shareholders more broadly. I suppose the simple answer is there wasn't much to say. I mean, we were constrained by our Joint Venture partner. We were constrained by the government, in a sense, at that point, having not come out with what they've recently come out with. I suppose it's a bit like a duck on a pond. From our point of view, there's plenty going on beneath the surface, but there wasn't much tangible that we could actually say at that point. I guess when there was something to say, we've come out and said it. Regrettably, the shareholders have sort of said, "Well, that doesn't sound like anything new.
We've got a completely different view." I think one of the things I would add to what Tim has said about gas-to-power is, in the context of people being interested in these assets, there's actually been quite a lot of inbound interest in what we're doing, both in terms of the existing plan for the 85, the proposal for the 15, and potentially for a much bigger plant. I know some people asked some questions about the availability of turbines, and there is no doubt a much longer lead time to acquire turbines than there are these reciprocating engines that we're getting for the 85. Having said that, some of the people who are approaching us have access to, because they're very big in that market globally, shorter lead times on turbines. I don't think we're quite as concerned about that.
It is important to note that there is this intersection where we would say, "Well, we're well positioned.
That actually reminds me of a question that was submitted around the extra 15-megawatt expansion. Whilst that's still going through that process, in terms of the actual engines required for that project, we're comfortable that they're available for in that timeframe. I might point this one at Peter.
Sure.
With regards to rebuilding institutional support, what's in place to build that support and re-rate the share price?
I think this one came up a few times. What we've got to do is deliver on what we say we're going to do. For me, critical focus is getting South Erregulla up and running, building a pathway forward with Hancock for West Erregulla. Once we have those two, looking for how the funding—the various options that Tim alluded to on funding for Ocean Hill—so that we can continue to develop that. Underpinning that, relying to have the continued revenue and profitability of Walyering. I think delivering on all those four, which we talked about in the strategic review, critical for me and the management team, that ultimately will underpin a stronger share price as we show that we can deliver what we say we're going to.
Yeah. Okay. There's been a couple of extra questions coming through. John, this might be one for you. There's been a couple of questions on what the strategic review costs the company. Whether you'd like to address that?
Yeah. Look, I think we would not necessarily come out and give a specific figure, but to give you some context, Robert Radley, who runs Oliver Wyman's office in Western Australia, is a very, very good management consultant. I worked with him 20-odd years ago. We prevailed upon him to not charge his usual rates and substantially less anyway than the kind of McKinseys at this world. It was a short, sharp review over, I think, a couple of week period, really, two or three weeks of intense work. As I said earlier, it was more in the context of, in a sense, assistance to an existing Board and management team. We have done this sort of thing before. Certainly, the Board has. It is a modest sum. It is not a number that you go, "Wow, that is a serious amount of money." It was a modest sum.
Sure. Just trying to find—sorry. I'm just trying to get through quite a lot of these questions. John, this might be one for you to speak to. What ideas or options do you see out of your discussions with the government, and what sort of timeframe are those discussions happening in?
There've been probably three quite significant discussions with government over the last probably month. We started without going into specifics about who said what to whom. We've been meeting with exactly the right people at very senior level within government. I guess, as we've all said, it's been interesting that the government is now in a position to go public on some of the concerns that have been expressed about shortfall in power and what the closing of the coal-fired power stations might look like and what happens in the interim when the government stops subsidizing the coal coming out of Griffin into Blue Waters. We are having ongoing discussions, without us even going into any great detail, as there's a significant meeting in the next few days where we're scoping out what some of the comments the energy minister made on the weekend might mean practically.
You can imagine that one of the things that anyone building an asset like this would be keen to see is some kind of definitive support from government or GTEs in terms of a power purchase agreement, which would underwrite the capacity to fund. That might not just be a GTE. It might well be other industrial users of power. Again, it is kind of ironic that all this came together at the same time because it has been bubbling away in the background. We are very encouraged if you read what the energy minister said on the weekend. It is actually good to see this is coming out. We would say that there is still not a lot of time left to solve the problem. Government does not want the lights to go out.
Even if it stops the suburbs' lights going out, that in load-sharing might mean that industry has to shut down or load-shed, which plays to Peter's point about that's completely at odds with the idea of creating more robust local manufacturing. You need the energy to do that. Again, it's all coming together at the right time. The ongoing discussions will hopefully lead to something specific that we can announce before too long.
Yeah. There's been a direct question around the estimated return on investment for the 85-megawatt gas peaking plant. I just wanted to point you—I don't have that in front of me, but those numbers were all released as part of the final investment decision back in November. If you head on to our site and look for the FID announcement, which I think was the 23rd of November last year, that will give you all the details and all the assumptions behind the FID. That also gives you an ROI based on those assumptions.
One thing I might mention, Emma, which has come out a couple of times, is the right sizing of the executive team and indeed the Board for the size of company. We were north of $1 billion market cap not that long ago. I think our view was that everything was properly sized. Since then, we've actually shed some management people. People have asked, "What are you going to review the Board?" I think we're certainly happy to review the size of the Board, bearing in mind that anyone needs to do a skills matrix and understand that you've got the right skills to run the company. I think we're optimistic that we can really rebuild the size of the company. There are some quite complex things to achieve, whether it's in building plants, whether it's negotiating Joint Venture agreements, or whether, in fact, it's further exploration.
Bear in mind that we're not running a fat organization. We want to be lean and mean. We're taking steps in that regard. Just to allay any concerns that shareholders might have about that.
Yeah. Great. I've got one directed at Tim. Would a partial sell down of the South Erregulla power plant be considered as a sort of potential future equity capital injection or banking covenant?
Yeah. Look, I guess it could be. We'd be open to discussions. It could extract value from our existing assets. It's not something we've considered at the moment. If there was to be a discussion in the future, I think we'd certainly give it due consideration. Like I said before, the hurdle for us is maximizing that return for shareholders out of our vertically integrated business strategy.
Yeah. We've probably got time for a couple more. There's one here that I might take. Someone's asked, "Why did management decide to drill the Walyering East location when, in hindsight, it was determined that it was in a poor location and was a waste of time and resources?" As a geologist, I can probably address that. That hindsight is a beautiful thing. At that stage, we were looking at ways to be able to uplift production at Walyering. The location of the well in terms of where it was was the best location we saw at the time geologically. Obviously, it brings with it challenges with the tie-in, with the pipeline, and crossing a highway. At the time, the well was considered a good enough opportunity, but it's still an exploration well. That opportunity, whilst we did intersect gas, and we're yet to test that.
That is really part of that broader capital allocation piece that Tim's been talking to. In terms of choosing a well that's a waste of time and resources, I don't think is what we'd actually say. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, especially in oil and gas exploration. We've probably got time for one more. Peter, is there a commercial team in place to write contracts and front-run gas sales?
Yes. Simple answer. Through some of the restructure, we have the key commercial person who's been driving a lot of that historically. The commercial function has moved under Tim. Tim has a lot of that expertise from oil and gas as well as in other industries. I think we've got a strong team in there. We are looking to add another more junior person in that team as well. We also have the strong commercial capability in our senior legal team, particularly in our general counsel. I think we've got a very strong team in that space.
Yeah. Great. It's probably time for one more, John. This is probably best addressed by you. What has the Board done to arrest the slide in the share price? Do you think there's any manipulation or short selling of the stock in the background? Is there anything you plan to do to address this?
I think I mentioned earlier when we were all fellow shareholders, I never powered a whole lot more shares a few cents ago. And I bought some on the way down after the South Erregulla issues or results. I think that we acutely feel the slide in the share price and the slide in value, we think, obviously, significantly unfair in terms of how successful we were as an explorer. Most of our wells were successful until two of them were not. One of the three, in fact, was, and we are monetizing that. The market is a cruel place. I think Peter mentioned it best, that you actually run the business, and then you obviously tell a story to the market, and then hopefully you get more buyers and sellers. You see in the Australian market, and you see it elsewhere, but particularly here, some very, very aggressive short selling.
I think I've got a particular aversion to short sellers. I've never done it myself. I think it's just really negative, particularly for smaller shareholders. How do you get a situation where a large shareholder loans someone their shares to actually bear down the market? It just seems intriguing to me. I mean, where's the winner there? There has definitely been a significant amount of shorting. You've seen it in the lithium space. You've seen it elsewhere. It can be very, very disheartening because it almost doesn't matter what you do. You've got this ability to sort of spread bad news and then take advantage of it. I think we're all committed to rebuilding the share price and the value in the company. You've heard some of those plans today.
I think that the tailwinds and the now macro environment in Western Australia for gas, whether it's gas into the pipe or is it gas into a power station up in the Perth Basin, the tailwinds are there. It's up to us to deliver now. We would hope that that message starts to get out to the market and the stock rebuilds and the shorters get taught a lesson. I think that's what I'd say.
I think the other thing is, as we build the institutional holder space, they tend to generally take a longer-term view. We tend to get a lot less of that shorting. They're in there longer-term. They buy into the story, and that's what we've got to deliver. I think that'll provide more stability in the share price and ultimately drive the share price up as well.
Yeah. Great.
Having said that, we've got some very loyal, long-term individual shareholders, and we acknowledge that as well. Some of you have been very loyal and very long-suffering, and we're very grateful for that.
Yeah. Great. We have run out of time. I'm aware there are quite a lot of questions, and some are quite specific. I will just remind everyone that we will be addressing the market again in the quarterly, which is only a few weeks away. We will take a lot of these questions away if they have not been answered and answer as much as we can in that quarterly and use that to face that discussion. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. We will be speaking to you again soon.
Thank you.
Thanks, everyone.
Thanks everyone.