What is it about?
Every oil and gas field or project has uncertainties about what resource is there, how it is distributed, and how the field will perform during production lifetime. Much time is spent understanding such uncertainties - but it is often difficult to express what difference these will make to project value, and what can be done about them. We propose that uncertainties which could cause deviation from planned performance can be expressed as "risk events" in a standard description format. Use of this standard format makes it easier to identify various types of risks and helps devise actions to manage them. We show examples of types of risks that have been identified in different field types and settings.
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Why is it important?
The vast majority of large oil and gas projects underperform. Even producing field often fail to meet production and value generation targets. The methodology in our paper can help to identify the potential reasons for such underperformance BEFORE it happens, so that specific measures can be put in place to protect value.
Perspectives
Form experience I know that many geoscientists are happy talking about uncertainty, but less so about risks (except for exploration risk, which is a different thing). Other disciplines, particularly in project management and HSE talk about risks and risk "events" all the time. This paper borrows the risk event framework and shows how it can be applied to oil and gas fields.
Philip Smalley
Imperial College London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Event-based risk management for subsurface risks: An approach to protect value generation from oil and gas fields, AAPG Bulletin, September 2017, American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG),
DOI: 10.1306/11301616084.
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