Our geoscience projects often identify new play concepts or highlight additional potential in existing plays that were previously overlooked. But where do we go from there? How do we earn the right to test these ideas with the drill bit? What leads companies to decide to spend tens, and sometimes hundreds, of millions of dollars to test a geological idea or play concept?
Our geoscience projects often identify new play concepts or highlight additional potential in existing plays that were previously overlooked. But where do we go from there? How do we earn the right to test these ideas with the drill bit? What leads companies to decide to spend tens, and sometimes hundreds, of millions of dollars to test a geological idea or play concept?
In many ways some of the questions we have to answer will be familiar to any one who has ever played the lottery – what is the size of the prize, will I make or lose money by playing it, what is the chance of success and how much will I regret not playing? Given the footprint and profile of our operations, however, there are other political, societal, reputational and sustainability issues that must also be assessed and which play key roles in arriving at the final decision to proceed or decline.
This talk will illustrate how geoscientists use their subsurface knowledge to provide the parameters needed to answer some of those questions; how we estimate the volume and chance of success (or risk) of testing a prospect or play in a range of business scenarios. The multi-disciplinary approach taken to estimate the materiality of a project and how this generates metrics that are used to compare competing investment opportunities. Finally, we consolidate the above-ground issues and show how these may be convolved with the technical and commercial metrics to assist in the final decision. A set of “health warnings” will flag some of the key assumptions, risks and uncertainties that our estimates accumulate along the way.
Key take-aways from this talk include the realisation that we are dealing with estimates and that there are no right answers; that human factors implicitly affect any final business decisions; and, most importantly, that an accurate play assessment is in the DNA of every successful subsurface business opportunity.
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