WHO SHOULD ATTEND

All exploration team members and leaders including geologists, geophysicists, geochemists, analysts, reservoir engineers, economists, planners and managers who make business decisions based upon exploration data

YOU WILL LEARN HOW TO

• Calculate geological risk and uncertainty in exploration prospects

• Determine prospect volumes

• Assess reserve distribution in a play

• Predict the number and estimated sizes of future fields

• Describe/calibrate risks associated with finding a successful play

ABOUT THE COURSE

Exploration professionals and managers must manage their time and resources carefully in the modern business world. Key to this management process is a full understanding of exploratory opportunities and their potential impact on the organization. Assessment of plays and prospects is an important tool in managing financial and human resources.

This fully revised and updated course evolved from an approach created through the work of Dave White into a fully modern approach to defining prospect and play volumetrics, the uncertainties in defining these volumes and the risk that the accumulation exists.  It is a practical course, easy to adapt directly in the workplace.  During the course, students learn evaluation techniques applicable in any assessment scheme that an organization might use. The course evaluates other published approaches and contrasts them with the recommended procedures allowing the participants to choose the very best approach to resource evaluation.  It is significant to note that this course offers the industry the only quantitative play assessment procedure that is repeatable from play to play and offers measures of the play prospectiveness (size and number of future fields); no other published play assessment offers anything more than qualitative judgments. Important techniques to sum multiple prospective zones and adjacent prospects are developed.

The course objectives are: (1) to provide knowledge and unique tools for practical, systematic, predrill assessment of potentially recoverable oil and gas; (2) to use the best available methods, trap volumetrics and hydrocarbon charge for prospects, and potential numbers and sizes of prospects for plays; (3) to quantify all geologic risks and uncertainties using hand calculations; and, (4) to provide insights for managers and reviewers in evaluating assessments, avoiding pitfalls, high-grading exploration opportunities, and planning selectively for the future. It focuses on the exploration concepts and models that are essential to effective assessments.  The concepts and techniques learned in the course are applied to real industry examples in exercises and workshops.

The unique tools include comprehensive assessment forms for prospects and plays, and graphs, data tables, and guidelines for making all assessment decisions. These tools help participants estimate risks and success ratios, field-size distributions, field and prospect densities, trap geometry corrections, multiple reservoir factors, porosities, permeabilities, saturations, formation volume factors, gas/oil ratios, formation temperatures, oil and gas recovery efficiencies, API gravities, gas gravities, NGL ratios, and oil and gas yields from source rocks. The forms and procedures are easily adaptable for internal usage in any oil and gas organization adoption of a consistent assessment scheme will allow for equitable comparisons of opportunities across the company and can serve as a basis for benchmarking company exploration performance. All factors can be handled in either metric or English units. Calculations are simple, but participants will find a basic scientific hand calculator helpful.

COURSE PROFILE

The table below summarizes the course and illustrates the focus of the course. Included in this profile are the skills learned in the course, level of the skills learned, number of examples, time committed to exercises, case histories demonstrated and number of PowerPoint slides shown by topic.

COURSE APPROACH 

Instructors should be responsive to the needs of the students, our customers/clients; this is reflected in the course content and the delivery.  Practical business aspects are the primary focus of the course.  During the week, participants find this time spent together valuable learning experience and exchange of knowledge.  A common theme is to reconsider the participant's identity. For example, rather than considering himself a geologist, I hope to point out to the student that he is actually a business man who uses his geological skills to solve business problems.  This perspective allows the participant to return to work with a renewed commitment to the organization and a set of tools to make decisions within the context of solving a business problem not just accomplishing a detailed technical task or interpretation.  This will allow the geologist (or geophysicist, or engineer, or petrophysicist) to finally understand the level of detail necessary to solve the problem.  She will then understand that a 60% solution is adequate - saving two months over evolving a 90% solution that was the expected standard.

A second key approach is to allow the students input into course content.  Each course starts with an exercise called "Expectations".  This exercise allows the students to list their expectations for the week that are used to focus the course to their desires.

At the end of each learning section, a form allows the students to categorize their learning. Topics include:

• Major lessons

• Principles and theories considered

• Major capabilities

• Organizational and personal strategies to exploit capabilities

• Major limitations

• Organizational and personal strategies to avoid limitations

• Business implications

• Questions for instructor

COURSE CONTENT

• Geological controls of oil and gas occurrence: Their impact on exploration risk and success

• Review of common assessment methods: Selection of the most practical approach

• Applications of volumetric prospect assessments: Techniques, comparative data, and graphs to estimate input factors, such as trap volume, porosity, net/gross saturation, hydrocarbon fill fraction, formation volume factors, and recovery efficiencies

• Probability methods: The expression of uncertainty for input factors and results including Monte Carlo techniques

• Risk analysis: Principles and practice

• Hydrocarbon charge assessment: Procedures for estimating possible amounts of oil and gas generated, migrated, and trapped in prospects

• Prospect assessment workshop: Projects supplied either by the instructor or by participants, worked by teams and reported to the entire group

• Play assessment techniques: Estimating the possible numbers, sizes, and associated risks for potential fields, with useful data on field densities, field-size distributions, oil versus gas relationships, and dependent versus independent risks

• Play recognition and mapping: Play classification and subdivision, and play maps that high-grade the most favorable areas with minimal geologic risks

• Play assessment workshop: Projects supplied either by the instructor or by participants, worked by teams and reported to the entire group

• Aggregation of assessment results: Summing, de-risking, and preparing for economic analysis

• Limitations, pitfalls, uses, and discovery concepts: The philosophy of judging and using assessment results and the importance of basic geologic concepts

EXAMPLES

The instructor of this course is willing to accept examples from your company for analysis in the class as one of the demonstration exercises. Please contact PetroSkills Training for a list of the information and support data required, as well as the necessary lead time.