Objective Oriented Hydrocarbon Asset Evaluation Techniques

The ever-rising financial and operational challenges in the oil and gas industry have put the goals under all kinds of complexity, competition, and significant instability as never happened in history before.  Even, industrial uncertainty management practices have failed to estimate unprecedented cases like negative crude oil prices. Besides having ultra-low demand in the market due to pandemic, renewable energy sources have also grown significantly to be a real threat to the oil and gas industry. Moreover, Industry 4.0, environmental pollution, electric cars are changing the energy market significantly. Unusual times require completely out of box extraordinary approaches for the sustainability of a hydrocarbon ecosystem. Exploration and development of a hydrocarbon asset involve costly and high-risk procedures. Therefore, many companies during recent years have canceled, stopped, or reduced their projects. 

Unprecedented extraordinary approaches for exploration and development projects have to be targeted to maximize profit with minimal risk and strict selection criteria.  Cost reduction, proven technologies, well defined/multilevel/large spectrum objectives, qualified expertise should be simultaneously employed on technical and commercial planning. 

Current market parameters manifest large uncertainty envelopes in addition to the marginal reservoirs and fields as the current subject of operations due to long production history. Long-lasting low crude oil prices have forced operating companies to downsize the human resources. Therefore technical opportunities with slight commercial values have to be captured in a quick fashion before losing a market cycle. 

The backbone of the right investment decision for a hydrocarbon asset lies in the accurate reservoir description and well-defined development techniques. Recently developed technologies, high-speed computers, and high capacity technical software packages are some of the tools for qualified experts to generate a healthy ground for management decisions. These tools also support technical and management teams in the project budget, timeline, and resources. It is the nature of the oil and gas industry not to hold resources full time but better based on the project lifecycle. Instead of having a resource available all the time, it is much more effective and efficient to have access to the right resources, at the right time, for the right task. In addition to the multidisciplinary environment, operating companies are adopting, a multi-industrial approach might bring a better sustainability edge to the project. Using an oil or gas well for geothermal power production during or even after hydrocarbon recovery is a good example of such an approach. Using water well drilling rigs for shallow reservoirs or rigless drilling techniques or biotechnology methods for heavy oil recovery are additional practices of multi-industrial approaches. 

Keywords: marginal opportunities, hydrocarbon assets, multi-industrial approach