"Who is this bunch of Paddies?" laughs Tom Hickey, the chief financial officer of Tullow Oil, imagining the questions raised by the company's arrival this month in the FTSE 100.
The most successful independent oil and gas company on the London market is the answer, due to Tullow's achievements in finding oil in Africa. In the past two decades, Tullow has come a long way from its beginnings with a dry well outside a village in the middle of Ireland.
However, its debut in the index comes at a critical time. The next six months or so will determine how far that success is going to be extended. The example of Cairn Energy, the previous representative of the independent exploration and production sector in the FTSE 100, is a lesson on the risks inherent in the sector.
Tullow starts with something of an advantage, however, because its rise has been based on not one big discovery, such as its rival Cairn Energy, but on two, in Uganda and Ghana.
Due to the good judgment and good luck of Aidan Heavey, who founded Tullow Oil in 1985 and remains its chief executive, the company has built a powerful presence in Africa, which has been this decade's most exciting region for oil exploration.
After that first dry well in Ireland in 1986, Mr Heavey went next to Senegal, and began building a business. In 2004, that business took a big step forward with the $570m acquisition of South African-listed Energy Africa – a deal that brought some of the exploration rights that have yielded Tullow's most important discoveries.
Tullow is the only UK-listed exploration and production company to be a big name in Africa, Mr Hickey says. Its African business, run from Cape Town in South Africa, is active in 13 countries.
"We were there a long time before other companies decided it was the place to get into," Mr Hickey says.
Tullow had built relationships, too. "If an African partner or government is looking at doing a deal with an oil company, they will probably go with the person they know better."
One of the rewards has been in Uganda, where Tullow has been exploring the region around Lake Albert in the north-west of the country. It has drilled seven wells in succession – an unheard-of strike rate – and found an estimated 150m-200m barrels, with a potential for 1bn, or according to some, even more.
Because Uganda is land-locked, getting the oil out to export markets will not be easy as it will need a 1,300km pipeline through Kenya to the east coast, at a cost of $2bn. However, Tullow plans to bring in a bigger partner towards the end of the decade, to reduce its risk and "take some money off the table".
The other big discovery that has powered Tullow's shares higher, is offshore in Ghana, in about 1,400m of water. Tullow has a roughly 35 per cent share in an area that is believed to hold 480m barrels, but could have 1.3bn or more.
In Uganda, the Ngassa well, which is looking for an estimated 500m-plus barrels, will begin drilling next month, and is expected to take about 90 days.
In Ghana, three more appraisal wells are to be drilled by the end of this year or early next year, to give a sense of whether those higher estimates of the oil reserves are justified.
So by next March, Tullow's position could look very different, depending on the fortunes of those wells.
However, last week brought a reminder of what can go wrong. Tullow revealed that the Kudu-8 well in Namibia, seen as another exciting prospect earlier, had found gas but not in sufficient quantities to be commercially viable. Tullow is pressing ahead with a gas-to-power project, but for now further exploration is on hold. "We will go back and scratch our heads and consider what this means," Mr Hickey says.
That bad news had only a minimal impact on the share price. Failures in Uganda and Ghana would be more serious.
Like several of its rivals, it has used its cash flows from mature oil and gas fields in the North Sea to fund its exploration around the world, and its most recent results, were hammered by the slump in the UK gas price. Pre-tax profits fell 56 per cent to £66.6m.
Mr Hickey insists, however, that the squeeze on revenues will have no effect on its exploration programme, as it shifts its emphasis away from the UK.
This year the company will invest about £400m, up from £330m last year, and the proportion going into the UK is falling from 45 per cent last year to 30 per cent this year. Next year it will be even lower. "We are not turning the North Sea off, but we are turning it down," Mr Hickey says.
That shifting emphasis shows where Tullow's fortunes will be decided. For investors, today's revenues and profits, heavily reliant on the North Sea, are irrelevant. It is the oil in the ground in Africa that matters, and for that the results of the forthcoming wells are all-important.
Tullow may have achieved the respectability of the FTSE 100 but that does not mean it will not be an exciting ride.
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