Reputations are both made and destroyed in the aftermath of the drill sequence. But what is behind the ranking that determines where the rig goes next? It is the prospect evaluation process, the process that determines which prospect has the largest potential.
In turn, to make sure that it is genuinely the highest potential prospects that end up at pole position in the drilling sequence, many companies use a peer review process, where the “prospect police” sit with the evaluation teams and agree on volumetric and risk assessments for each potential drillable feature.
This peer review process is not required for smaller companies that only have one licence and two prospects, but the larger companies, especially those that operate in more than one basin, surely need some form of oversight in their attempt to allocate capital most sensibly.
Some peer review styles are dictatorial, some are collaborative. In some companies, the same people fly all over the world to ensure consistency, even though it is permitted in places for their recommendations to be ignored by the exploration manager. It others, it isn’t. No matter what the organisational style is, the result of the peer review system is that in most companies, there is only a very small number of approved and drill-ready prospects. In other words, it is all quite shallow.
More detail on this approach can be seen in the accompanying video of the GIS-pax LinkedIn Site:
And there are other significant drawbacks of the peer review process. The first obvious one relates to the boss. If he or she is in the room, forget about an objective and technically focused discussion – people will be more concerned about keeping their jobs. It is a lot better without the boss being around, but still, it rarely happens that the same review done by the same team twice will result in the same number. Let alone when the evaluation is carried out with other experts. In addition, non-exploration managers who sometimes get involved at a later stage have the tendency to throw out the risky prospects that have a POS of less than 20 %. It is these prospects that may hold your next big find!
In contrast to what many companies think, there is an alternative to the peer review system: Numeric split risk maps. In most basins, the risks associated with reservoir presence, seal, trap and charge can be established from the data. If this is organised in split risk play maps, peer reviews tend to be much quicker. The added benefit is that you now maintain a set of maps that capture a range of prospects rather than having to discuss each individual prospect during a separate meeting. And last but not least, by having this system in place, many more prospects can be ranked in one go, providing more depth to the portfolio that ultimately determines the drill sequence.
This is the fourth of a series of articles based on work and experience from the GIS-Pax team in Australia, as presented by Ian Longley in a series of videos on LinkedIn.
Find the previous articles here:
Why the term “fault block” is a useless way to describe a trap
Why traffic light play maps are useless
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