I believe Hession said bobcat was on its 2nd sidetrack due to the shale but the other 2 wells had gotten thru it ok. He was attempting to dilute the bad news of bobcat, I.e., two failed attempts and now working on the 3rd attempt. That means their prior methods of dealing with this difficult interval aren't working. He hated to share that negative news so he used diversionary statements like the 1 in 10 typical exploration success rate and the cap rock comment. If the 3rd attempt doesn't work they may have to abandon the hole if you are out of options, materials and/or budget. That would not be good news. There is a limit and at some point you stop and quit and go drill another well somewhere else. That is not uncommon and could occur here. Hopefully it won't.
These well estimates typically are P50 numbers, meaning there's a 50% chance it will take longer. Multiple bad things can happen to substantially extend the time and cost. This is typical oilfield. Exploration wells generally are much riskier but there's exceptions. Sooner or later every company drills a "well from hell". Those are big budget busters that take forever and encounter all kinds of big, difficult problems. Some in the end prevail and are successful and others are big failures. But it's only a 1'well failure. Not the end of the world.
Companies use on site precautions to prevent the leaking of info. Plus no one at the rig has a complete data set to provide useful specifics. The remoteness here helps. More likely someone in IOC would be the source of a leak.
Wells which take longer than expected generally means they encountered greater difficulty and problems than expected and/or the pay zone is more confusing and needs more extensive evaluation to sort it out. The fastest well is one that has no drilling problems and no pay. A dry hole. The next fastest is one with no drilling problems and has textbook high quality pay which can be evaluated with minimal evaluation operations. For wahoo it's looking like it's neither of the last two cases.
