If that sounds a bit harsh then you weren't paying attention 10 years ago when Royal Dutch Shell shot itself, and the rest of the industry, in the foot by using a single word: "sequencing".
Back around the turn of the century The Slug enjoyed a chat with a senior Shell executive who spoke with alarming frankness about how his company would "sequence" gas developments around the Australian coast in a way which was best for Shell, and perhaps best for Australia.
Astonishing at the time, those comments remain astonishing to this day, and have obviously had a lasting effect on thinking within government ministries because last week, a decade after the first silly shot was fired by the business side of the debate, the government fired back.
Blunt-spoken Resources Minister Martin Ferguson trundled out his plan for use-it-or-lose-it laws when unveiling a draft white paper on the energy sector which included a revised way of treating retention leases, an agreement with the government which allows a company to sit on a discovery until it believes it can be developed profitably.
The key part of the proposed new policy is the potential to throw open to third parties oil and gas fields which the discoverer reckons are not yet commercial, but other people believe can be developed.
Hard-rock mining in Australia has had such a system for the best part of a century, with the most famous example of a company falling foul of the use-it-or-lose-it principle being Rio Tinto, which was forced by the WA government to sell its Ellendale diamond discovery, made 20 years earlier, after a rival, Kimberley Diamond Company, said it could start a mine even if Rio couldn't - and it did.
Today, Ellendale is part of London-listed Gem Diamonds, and while it has struggled to post strong profits because of poor grades and poorer diamond prices in the aftermath of the first phase of the global financial crisis, the government of WA has collected a handsome swag of royalties.
Oil and gas, despite a totally different set of dynamics such as much higher capital investment requirements, looks very much like diamonds and other hard rocks to government with this common thread linking both - the Queen owns whatever is in the ground.
Americans struggle with that concept, but Australians (and the Brits and the Dutch) understand because they all live in a constitutional monarchy where there is this pleasant little charade played in which (a) the Queen, or the Crown as it is called, is deemed to own everything below the earth's surface and (b) the federal and/or state governments administer the minerals industry on her behalf.
Who is the Queen, ask the Yanks? We thought we owned what we discovered. No, my dear friends, that is one of your bigger mistakes made while working in Australia.
Invoking the name of the Queen sounds quaint, and is quaint - but it works, because the system really acts as a rental arrangement in which an explorer asks the Crown for permission to drill holes, and then asks the Crown for permission to mine or extract.
Minimal upfront fees are required because government gets its pay-day when production starts - a win all round, even to the point of government being prepared to wait for a company to get its stars, and the markets, aligned.
The tricky bit comes when a company says it needs to wait, and wait, and wait...
Governments don't like that, which is why Ellendale became a forced sale and why a few pointed comments have been made about oil and gas discoveries such as the Woodside (and Shell) Browse Basin (35 years ago), and the ExxonMobil/BHP Scarborough gas fields (25 years ago).
Ferguson did not name names when releasing his white paper but did say: "It is important that the retention lease framework does not provide an opportunity to indefinitely ‘warehouse' petroleum resources."
What a shame the minister didn't toss sequencing into the speech accompanying his white paper launch because that's what the changes are all about - a push to devise a system that prevents a global oil major developing reserves which suits its timetable rather than that of the host country.
In theory, both the host and explorer should (and do) work together. But that one slip of the tongue which gave the game away 10 years ago revealed that some oil companies enjoy playing "a Shell game".
