Front End Design Matters

Felix makes a great point about demonstrating the value created during early Front End work - I worked with colleagues in the early 2000's and we measured the value before and after our engagement. We had two issues either the client thought the results were too good to be true. The second issue related to the first in as much as no clients were willing to have either their company name or project name's mentioned! We need more openess.?

Very interesting topic. Conceptual design methods and tools are well established and documented, and on this I agree with Michelle Wellsbury?. I think psychological factors play a bigger role than we practitioners understand. Cognitive biases, behavioral styles, organizational dynamics and cultural factors influence greatly the outcome of the field development planning process. Reading "Thinking, fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman has been very enlightening in this regard. What I also have found difficult is to demonstrate the value of early project planning and decision making, since it is mostly avoided costs. Modeling and simulation (in general, not reservoir or numerical modeling in particular) has been very helpful to communicate the results and value of the process in an understandable way.

Well Clive this is my fourth draft in response to your post (I can email you the full set if you like). You and I have worked on many front-end studies together over the years – some ended up “on hold”, some of the owners ended up selling (using our work as evidence), some studies went on to projects. I think you might be interested in the results of an internet search on “Accelerated Conceptual Engineering”. As you know my CV includes being responsible for internal and external benchmarking. We can do a lot worse that exploiting the IPA FEL approach by bringing to the attention of investors that the better the FEL score the more likely that there will be a good outcome relative to an upstream project and budgeting/planning accordingly (“justifying our time”). I recall that the benchmarking for the cost of FEL (the pre-project study phase) for a good eventual outcome was 3%. I would be pleased to support a community of practise.

There are so many articles written on this subject. Everyone knows it’s the right thing to do but it can be all too easy to cost cut in this area and jump to what appears to be the “obvious” solution without truly considering the individual project drivers and value requirement.

For sure this one of the most important stages in project life cycle and shall be conducted by experts only, expensive ones? yes, but they are going to take just the right time to issue the right deliverables.