No prize is offered for the data that demonstrates drilling success in the Arckaringa, except a chance to share in the glory of explaining how a small Australian company could have stumbled over a discovery that rivals the oilfields of Saudi Arabia.

There is, of course, a degree of "tongue" being poked into The Slug's cheek when writing about the reported "shale-oil bonanza" attributed to Linc Energy.

But there is also the more serious of issue of why Linc was allowed to report what it did without anyone in the oil industry questioning the claim, or anyone at the Australian Securities Exchange asking for more detail.

For starters, there is the question of how many oil and gas exploration holes Linc has drilled into its Arckaringa petroleum licence areas and why did The Slug's colleagues in the daily news media not dig a little deeper before playing their role in boosting Linc.

One person not complaining is Linc founder, chief executive officer and major shareholder Peter Bond.

Ten days ago, when Linc dropped its bombshell "discovery" story, complete with two technical reports to support its claim that it could be sitting on up to 233 billion barrels of oil equivalent, the stock's share price rocketed up by 46.5%.

The 95c-a-share run from $2.04 on the morning of the announcement to $2.99 just 48 hours later boosted Bond's fortune by a rather pleasant $192 million - which is the 95c/share effect on a parcel of 202.1 million Linc shares.

As sanity returned to the market, Linc retreated to around $2.15, shrinking Bond's gain to just $22 million but leaving him with a personal fortune in his Linc shares alone of $434.5 million.

Money aside, there is a lot to look at (gawk at, even) with the fabulous story of Linc and its Arckaringa shale oil.

For newcomers to the saga it began at 9.16am on Wednesday, January 23, when Linc filed a report at the ASX headed Independent reports confirm significant potential for Linc Energy's shale oil in the Arckaringa Basin.

In the dot-points below were the salient claims, that:

• Gustavson Associates estimated the unrisked prospective resources for unconventional oil equivalent at 233Bbbl
• DeGolyer and MacNaughton put the unrisked potential at 103Bbbl
• Gustavson put the potential in conventional reservoirs at a separate 125Bboe; and
• Linc was working with Barclays Bank to introduce a joint venture partner with shale oil expertise to "fund the development of the Arckaringa Basin assets".

Call The Slug old-fashioned but it might have been more appropriate to describe the first stage of any future JV as exploring the assets, rather than developing them.

As far as can be seen the two consultancies have conducted a perfectly legitimate desktop analysis of what might be found in the basin without an awful lot of hard physical evidence such as detailed drilling.

That point is best summed up in a paragraph in the DeGolyer and MacNaughton report under the heading "source of information".

The consulting firm states: "In the preparation of this report we have relied, without independent verification, upon information furnished by or on behalf of Linc with respect to the property interests to be evaluated, subsurface data as they pertain to the target objectives and prospects and various other information and technical data that were accepted as represented."

There is nothing wrong with any of that. It is what consultants do all the time - consider evidence as presented and then work out the possibilities and probabilities.

In the case of the Arckaringa claims it is, however, worth noting that an unrisked prospective resource is at the bottom of the list when it comes to resource estimates because of the missing links called commerciality and/or sufficient drilling.

As for the $20 trillion value put on the Arckaringa tenements, well, that was just some silly cadet journalist with a $2 calculator that had oodles of zeros which enabled him/her to multiply 233 billion by the oil price.

There is no doubt Linc may have its foot on something prospective in the Arckaringa but there is also no doubt that there is an awful lot of prospecting to be done before those unrisked prospective resources can be upgraded to anything commercially meaningful.

Which comes back to the original event and the question as to why someone did not ask Linc for a commercial explanation of its market sensitive statement, perhaps even asking when will the oil and gas start to flow.