This course introduces probabilistic and deterministic approaches, their benefits and shortcomings, as applied to project approval, appraisal, reservoir surveillance and production forecasting. Included is the examination of the factors contributing to project uncertainty; subsurface, drilling, facilities, production, scheduling, cost and economics. The aim is to deepen the understanding of the complex and varying risks involved in delivering accurate estimates of production, reserves and value to key internal and external stakeholders and hence enhance decision making capability. The course is orientated to building an understanding of the economic evaluation of oil and gas assets; the fundamentals of economic evaluation will be covered, including time value of money, discounting and NPV, project cash flow analysis and taxation.
Course Level: Skill Duration: 5 days Instructor: Pete Smith
Designed for you, if you are...
A reservoir, petroleum, or drilling engineer or geoscientist working in multi-discipline teams with at least 5 years’ experience of the oil & gas industry
A team leader or manager
How we build your confidence
This is a five-day classroom-based course with worked examples, case studies, individual and group exercises and discussions.
The benefits from attending
Participants will learn to:
Evaluate uncertainties for projects at different stages of the E&P lifecycle
Formulate problems probabilistically and systematically assess risks & uncertainties
Develop decision trees to lay-out the logic of the decision, evaluate the robustness of the decision and competently use the provided software
Select the key variables in a probabilistic evaluation and manage certainty by acquiring additional data (appraisal) or design of interventions (contingency)
Assess the volumetric derivation of resources, both deterministically and probabilistically
Validate data using statistical distributions and combine them using both parametric and Monte-Carlo methods
Evaluate the impact of correlations between variables whilst undertaking uncertainty assessments
Manage the process of acquiring additional data by isolating the most important variables and assessing its value
Topics
Introduction
Risk and uncertainty fundamentals, definitions
Value - measuring project value
Making decisions
Statistics and distributions
Estimating probabilities and ranges - Improving estimates by calibration
Bayesian revision - value of additional data
Combining distributions - Monte-Carlo Method - impact of portfolio choices
Finding a deterministic value that best represents a distribution
Heuristics of probability estimation - ground rules for estimation
Correlations and dependent variables - how best to incorporate them
Importance - the variables to focus upon
The concept of value
Basic process of economic evaluation, inflation, time value of money, nominal & effective interest rates, discounted cash flow, net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR), profitability index (PI), cumulative net cash-flow
Value of information - value of study, cost of delay, opportunity cost
The value of intervention, planning and flexibility
Risk and uncertainty in resource estimation
Volumetric uncertainty
Value of information evaluation
Production forecasting
Cost uncertainty
Schedule uncertainty and critical path commercial considerations
Case studies
Resource assessment - categorisation and classification of petroleum resources