However, those Petroleum Club members who were waiting on details as to how ChevronTexaco were going to deal with their assets, particularly their string of recent deepwater drilling successes in the offshore Carnarvon Basin, were sorely disappointed.
Ms Zygocki gave a lengthy address that was long on motherhood statements from the corporation, but fell short of detail. She outlined how ChevronTexaco has US$9 billion to spend globally this year but when asked how much was earmarked for Australia, either upstream or downstream, Ms Zygocki deferred.
While espousing their environmental commitment to PNG and Barrow Island, there was no mention of what commitment the company was going to make to exploration and development.
A ChevronTexaco spokesperson today denied the company was hiding or being secretive and said they were happy to forward details of their planned drilling to the Analyst Energy Review within the next few days.
"People want to know how many wells they are going to drill and what they are going to do with the 40 tcf of gas, not what their corporate human resources policy is," said one Petroleum Club member.
Another, a member of the legal fraternity, said there was only so much politicking one could take.
What Ms Zygocki did make very clear was that the Gorgon partners stood firmly outside of the Australia LNG consortium, and her statement that they controlled over 40tcf of uncommitted gas, led to many speculate - "what are you going to do with it?"
What was also clear from the evening was that industry expected the chief executive of a foreign company managing one of Australia's largest energy sources to be more expansive and less evasive, given the length of time she has been in the job.
What was also unfortunately even clearer was while her performance was polished, her presentation hadn't been roadtested under local conditions. Starting with what she described a "ChevronTexaco safety moment" where, in the search for 100% efficiency, after assigning numerical values to the alphabet, Ms Zygocki spelt out words such as knowledge (which gave 92%) and hard work which gave one 96%. It was attitude which spelt out 100%, the audience was told, to round out the anecdote.
What was truly unfortunate was that a lot of the audience had seen a similar email late last year where some wag had worked out that to exceed 100% one only had to spell out a word best not repeated in this journal - but sounds very similar to the word bullshirt - to attain an efficiency of over 120%. Truly an unfortunate start to the evening and one which many observers said set the tone for what followed.
