2020 Volume 85 Issue 1 Pages 11-16
Successful global oil & natural gas exploration activities require an integrated assessment system that couples geoscience and economic evaluations and enables objective ranking of opportunities according to specific corporate goals. Geoscience evaluations include assessments of the geologic risk that can be performed on a basin, play or prospect scale with an emphasis in delineating target areas with the highest prospectivity for gas. They need to include both local domain knowledge and global analogue studies, and they must also enable deterministic （process based） and probabilistic analyses. Economic evaluations include corporate priorities such as economic returns, the timing of production contributions and strategic considerations. All of these must be applicable with a live database that can manage global, country, basin, play and prospect data and that can be customized to meet specific client requirements. Welldefined processes and strict standards are required to enable objective geological risking and ranking of portfolios to be performed, and to develop the foundation for economic assessments and strategic decision processes.
