I found this interview with David Wood, CEO of Murphy Oil, where he discusses the Third Quarter 2010 results with a number of analysts. In the section I've quoted below, Evan Calio from Morgan Stanely asks him directly about the two exploration wells offshore Suriname. As you can see, Mr. Wood does not refer at all to Suriname in his answer, but he does suggest the company's preference for holding back drill results until the entire program is completed. To me, that suggests that hydro123 is correct in speculating we may not hear anything until January 27th.

Evan Calio - Morgan Stanley

Hi, good afternoon, guys. The fourth quarter looks like clearly an exciting quarter on exploration. How should we think about disclosure? Are you guys still going to hold results until you have both Suriname wells down, and do you expect to group the three Congo wells into one release? How should we think about the news flow from Murphy here?

David Wood

Yes, if you look at what we’re doing in this remainder of the year, it’s a lot of exploration expense, about $140 million, but let me kind of give you some granularity on that. Of that $140 million, $46.5 million is basically appraisal wells in Malaysia. We’re drilling a appraisal well on the Kerisi discovery, so Kerisi #2 that’s in Block K, that will be a subsea tieback to Kikeh. We’re drilling two wells at South Baxius [ph] in Sarawak blocks. We think that maybe an oil plus gas development and we’re trying to get comfortable to be able to sanction that next year.

And we’re appraising a potential Phase III gas discovery that we made at a prospect called Terra [ph]. And so, really we’re spending a little less than $100 million as to exploration exposure, and so that’s kind of the way it will run. Now, as far as timing goes, sometimes you’re not in control of your own destiny and some of our partners, particularly, national oil companies like to announce good news. So, my preference is to not talk about the Congo program until we’re finished, but we just announced about Titan because I thought that was important and so I think we’ll at those as we go along and make the calls as we go.

I will tell you on Congo, we’re drilling two wells at Turquoise 3 and Turquoise 4 in Cobalt and the rig is currently batch setting the Turquoise 3 and Turquoise 4 shallower section. It’s actually in Turquoise 4 now and then it goes to drill Cobalt and then it comes back to finish the wells through their objective section at Turquoise Marine-3 and Marine-4. We have added a deepening to Turquoise Marine-4 as we’ve been working reprocess data. We’ve seen the deepening potential become quite attractive under the Turquoise feature.

As you recall, we have oil in the Miocene section. We now believe that there is some deeper Paleocene and Albian or crustaceous section that could potentially be quite large. I’m talking about couple of 100 million barrel type potential in addition to what we were drilling before. So that may well impact the overall timing here, Evan but we’re excited about it. We want to drill that well. We think it’s a good time to do it and so that will also be a mix.