The Independent: Cairn is not for widows or orphans but a hold for those with patience: “Cairn has had an extraordinary few years, buying a block of land in north- western India from Shell and then discovering it was sitting on 2.5 billion barrels.”: Friday 11 November 2005

It was vague but certainly positive. Cairn Energy, the FTSE 100 oil and gas explorer, was updating its shareholders on progress at its Indian fields, before it takes analysts out there to look at the drilling work being done. A "reappraisal of petrophysical parameters" in the main fields at its Rajasthan project "suggests that the current evaluation may have been conservative". There be more oil, in other words.

Cairn has had an extraordinary few years, buying a block of land in north- western India from Shell and then discovering it was sitting on 2.5 billion barrels.

Meanwhile, the world appears to have got used to the idea that oil is a scarce commodity, particularly in the face of surging energy requirements from the industrialising nations of India and China. That has pushed prices to $60 a barrel and kept them there, dramatically increasing the potential value of even the limited reserves Cairn is conservatively predicting it has.

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