Reducing Uncertainties to Shape the Future of Exploration

Abstract

For any given Exploration oil and gas portfolio and associated opportunities, successful business decisions can only be made on the basis of technically robust estimates of the subsurface risk versus the resource potential and estimate of the associated upside(s). Ideally, these estimates should incorporate the entire spectrum of opportunities for the complete portfolio and they should be made in a consistent and comparable way. However, as Explorers, we are often faced with data that is incomplete, limited, of variable quality, and/or inconsistent. As a result, subsurface evaluation may be seen more as educated guessing rather than a robust science of evaluation grounded in facts and defensible logic. In their January 2020 paper "Randomness, serendipity, and luck in petroleum exploration" authors Milkov and Navidi (Ref 1.) go quite a bit further and demonstrate that luck is a significant factor in the exploration success equation. They also showed a general lack in long-term consistency in exploration results of individual companies. Indeed, after we looked at PETRONAS’ own historical POSg versus actual technical success rates and observed only a fair to poor relation between actual technical success rate and the pre-drill POSg estimate. A similar—albeit less worrisome—observation was made for volume ranges and fluid phase predictions. Clearly, there is, and always has been, a phenomenal challenge for the Petroleum Geoscientists to provide the sought after estimates as accurately as possible, and we were no exception. In a bid to improve on this PETRONAS set out on a more disciplined approach to characterizing subsurface uncertainties on its conventional exploration efforts. Over time, more accurate characterizations of such exploration risk and resource potential have followed from a series of procedural guidelines, enhanced capability training program and careful governance of exploration workflows. With improved capabilities and workflow consistency, our evaluation teams have delivered substantially better subsurface evaluations. This in turn has led to more confident decision-making on e.g., individual drilling decisions and new play entries. While our newly implemented workflows are not groundbreaking in isolation, in combination they have delivered notable success and an improved ability to shape the future growth for PETRONAS. In this article, we will highlight the main contributing changes and demonstrate that the overall improvements are indeed impactful. We are not directly challenging the article of Milkov et. al., but are convinced that professionalism and scientific discipline is the deciding factor in the Exploration success equation.