Mistakes always occur when doing things at pace, and they are starting to creep in now, with the latest being the compressor problems on the North West Shelf.

No one, not even Slugcatcher, knows the reason for a newly-installed compressor going offline. But it’s a fair bet that when the post mortems are conducted it will have something to do with the urgency gripping equipment suppliers, installers, and/or project owners.

All that Woodside Petroleum has said is that the compressor is cactus and it will take at least 38 days to replace it.

Sympathetic observers will say it could have happened to anyone.

Harder-nosed onlookers will agree. It could have happened to anyone, and probably will, because that’s precisely the conditions in which we now find the resources world – a frantic time when mistakes are more likely to happen.

So far, no one is pointing a finger at anyone, but that’s largely a result of there being so much cash sloshing around that mistakes, cost blow-outs, and project delays, are soon forgotten, or quickly explained away.

But when commodity prices start retreating to more normal levels, The Slug reckons that a few shareholders might start to ask some very pointed questions.

Woodside, for starters, will be asked precisely what went wrong at its fourth liquefied natural gas production train, and whether the problem has any similarity to previous problems at the project.

Readers with reasonable memories will know what The Slug is getting at because it was Woodside which suffered a few piling problems at both the North Rankin and Goodwyn platforms, and which misjudged the reserve levels at the Wanea/Cossack oilfield, and which suffered a rather costly blow-out on the Laminaria oilfield.

Oh be fair, say the defenders of Woodside’s management team. These things can happen to anyone.

Yes, they can. But the Woodside team, even if under slick new direction, just keeps on having problems – which is awfully embarrassing for a team which believes it is the best Australian oilfield operator.

And if the Train.4 problem is not enough for Woodside to explain, there is the second hot-button issue, a cost blow-out at the Chinguetti oilfield in Mauritania.

Shareholders in Chinguetti say the forecast increase in capital costs from a budgeted $US625 million to $US700 million is not a big deal.

John Doran from Roc Oil describes the increase as “not material”. Of greater concern would be a delay in completion.

That view sums up the oil game right now. Get it build quickly to catch the $US65 a barrel oil price, and if it costs a bit more to hit the start-up target, so be it.

But the Slug likes to take a longer-term view and argues that fast work is not necessarily good work.

Blame, to be fair, is yet to be apportioned, and it might even be just bad luck that Chinguetti is over-budget, and that the LNG train compressor failed.

It is also true that the financial damage will not be that significant. As Woodside says, sales aren’t lost, just deferred.

The real damage in these matter is done to reputations, and they take a lot longer to repair.