Handily for 3 Legs Resources, the AIM (Alternative Investment Market ) Pathfinder document setting out details of their offer to investors appears to have gone to print on the same evening that the French Senate were debating final ratification of the gaz de schiste bill. Why they could not have waited just one day for the final outcome beats me............But then again, why wait for the confirmation of bad news?!
As it is, the Pathfinder mostly confirms what we know already about the Cahors application. It informs us that 3 Legs originally applied for the licence in December 2009 and that the application was notified to the public by the French authorities in August 2010 ( I don't seem to remember this being the case, but anyway....). The notification triggered a 90-day period during which competing applications were allowed to be submitted, but none were, so 3 Legs' application is theoretically in process.
As we know, the current bill still needs to be ratified by the National Assembly, however, what the Pathfinder document states clearly is as follows. 'If the bill receives final approval and passes into law, it is likely that the Group's two pending concession applications in France will either not be granted or, if granted, will be subject to restrictions ( including a prohibition on hydraulic fracture stimulation ) which will make shale gas exploration and production currently unviable due to a lack of presently-existing alternative technologies'.
In other words, if you can't frack.......you can't extract shale gas. So it's up to us now to make sure that the Government doesn't try to allow fracking!
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