Appraising ultra-deepwater reserves: A new approach is intended to reduce uncertainty

摘要

Every oil or gas company that has ever existed has put some kind of number on reservoir performance. That number might have been in barrels, cubic feet, flow rate, pressure, metric tons, BTUs, water, a ratio, or some other measure, all measured over time. Time then was remeasured in money. That money translated to an economic metric such as net present value or booked reserves. Such metrics became the decision focus for the future of project investments. The actual metric of risk the investors were willing to take was often parlayed back to a machine (such as the popular computerized Monte Carlo statistical method) to grant comfort to the risk-takers. While we can calculate a risk-money number to several significant digits, how far we drift from hard reality using number analysis is too frequently measured in dry holes and premature production failures. This part of science is more of an art, and art is in the eye of the beholder. Therefore, science and engineering are turning to a machine process once again to see if there can be a more deterministic method we can use.