But that doesn't stop a deeply cynical observer from imagining that he's watching the start of a re-run of events which dogged the world's biggest resources company back in the 1990s.
Younger readers might not know much about what happened the best part of two decades ago. Older readers will shudder at the suggestion that history is about to be repeated by a company which made a series of terrible mistakes and was lucky to survive.
The trigger for these dark thoughts from The Slug, at the start of what looks likely to be a dark year, is the price of an important commodity in the future of BHP Billiton: $US2.98.
Believe it, or not, that was the price of a million British thermal units of natural gas in the US as the year 2011 crawled to a close last week, pushed down from around $US4.80MMBtu in early 2011, and a country mile below the $US13MMBtu in mid-2008.
The cause of the slumping gas price is two-fold. The US economy remains trapped in a period of low growth, verging on recession, just as new technologies unlock gas and oil trapped in shale and other rock units once regarded an uneconomic.
In effect, the shale-gas boom gripping the US and slowly spreading around the world has displayed the classic signs of a double-edged sword. One edge is the good news boom in hydrocarbon production - the other is the bad news of impact of low gas prices which are, in turn, starting to damage explorers and drilling companies.
The good news of low prices is the role being played by gas in helping to lever the US out of its debt-induced downturn. Everyone from industrial gas users to households is starting to feel the benefits of shrinking power bills.
The bad news is that companies which used debt to fund their exploration and development plans are suffering. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal last Friday, one of the leaders in shale gas, Chesapeake Energy, needs a gas price of $US4.38MMBtu to hit its 2012 revenue forecast of $US6 billion - meaning gas prices must rise by almost 30% for Chesapeake to hit its 2012 target.
If The Slug was a member of the Chesapeake management committee he would be suggesting that it might be time to start each meeting with a prayer.
The same suggestion might also be applied to BHP Billiton, which has placed big bets on shale gas, with the $US20 billion committed so far one of the most courageous decisions ever made by the directors of an Australia-based company.
In fact, you would have to go back to the 1990s to see a series of investment decisions of similar courage, a time when BHP (before its merger with Billiton) plunged deeply into a failing copper producer (Magma) in the US, platinum (Hartley) in Zimbabwe, and three failed projects in WA: titanium minerals (Beenup), hot-briquetted iron (Boodarie) and nickel (Ravensthorpe).
The full cost of those 1990s adventures has never been revealed by the management teams which replaced the people who made those ill-fated decisions, but a reasonable guess is $US20 billion in today's dollars - an interestingly similar cost to the current shale gas experiment.
Over time, BHP Billiton's high-priced move into shale gas should prove to be a winner. The world wants gas as a replacement for coal and oil on environmental grounds and is particularly interested in shale gas as it promises to be a universal fuel found in almost every country.
The problem with talking about investments being spread over a prolonged time period is summed up in the famous words of the great economist, Lord Keynes, when he said: "In the long run, we're all dead".
BHP Billiton's shale gas investments have not reached the point suggested by Keynes but there will unquestionably be a group of people inside the company looking at the critical question of "the carrying value" of the shale-gas assets.
They are the people in the accounts department who must ask whether the current value of the assets is more, or less, that what BHP Billiton paid for them, and that valuation process (which will be checked by outside auditors) ultimately comes back to the price at which the gas can be sold.
Early last year, when the shale gas plunge was launched, the price of gas in the US was around $4MMBtu, roughly 25% more than today. Since its first US gas investment, BHP Billiton has doubled-up on shale gas, making any accounting/auditing exercise quite difficult.
But eventually there will be a reckoning, and without a significant rise in the US gas price that reckoning will be extremely interesting.
