Petroleum exploration business development (new ventures) aims to select the “best” acreages available in a basin for seismics and the subsequent drilling projects. “Best”, at the first instance, may mean the optimality of geological risks, discoverable resource rewards and exploration expenditures.

Common Risk Segment Maps informs about the distribution of the petroleum play geological risks throughout the accumulation zone. CRS maps however may not set exploration priorities because due to high exploration maturity “very low risk” segments may run short of further drillable Prospects, while vice versa, the perception of “high risk” in another segment might be attributable to relatively low exploration maturity. For play based evaluation and segment ranking therefore the Optimum Segment Risk and Segment Maturation Risk are recommended as strategic ranking criteria. The first section of the VG-talk discusses the derivation of the optimum segment risk and the maturation risk from the actual segment common risk.

On the reward side the Prospective and the Yet-To-Find Resources count. The second part of the lecture reviews the methodologies of Prospect volumetric estimations and the Yet-To-Find assessments based on Field Size Distribution (FSD) and Accumulated versus Generated (A/G). The lecture concludes with the demonstration of the Exploration Priority Map of the Play which is delivered as the result of a multi-criteria ranking where the criteria include the Optimum Segment Risk, the Segment Maturation Risk and Segment Exploration Unit Cost (YTF/Expenditures).

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