Mix classical due diligence approaches with new data science applications to reduce risk, lower cost and optimize outputs
Getting ready to develop an asset is notoriously technical. Engineers and geologists grapple with uncertainty as they make decisions that will cost millions and hopefully return a multiple on that spend. To feel confident in their recommendations – and make that hopefully sound more like an absolutely – it is crucial to leverage as much historical data as possible, adjust and customize current assumptions, and create models to predict future outcomes. Like baking a cake, tweaking different ingredients or inputs in your designs can yield drastically different results. Below is a recipe for baking a successful design.
Ingredients for design optimization
Arguably, the most time-consuming step of this phase of the asset lifecycle, and in baking, is about defining what key inputs to focus on — which key ingredients will you need to adjust to ensure a successful design phase? Some of the key influencing factors to consider are spacing in both the horizontal and vertical, historical and forecasted production, subsurface properties and completion styles to optimize for the rock characteristics, and the timing of the development plans for full value realization of the pad.
However, there are often a few different chefs in the kitchen with different goals:
Reservoir engineers are tasked with analyzing every data point of production data, applying assumptions and tweaking decline curve parameters, and incorporating well costs and differentials to ultimately evaluate profitability of the development. Enverus Forecast Suite informs investment decisions by accelerating regional evaluation and screening with pre-generated forecasts on thousands of wells and facilitating the incorporation of proprietary data and customization.
Asset engineers need to quickly perform multidimensional spacing analysis for a holistic view of well performance. Enverus Spacing is a comprehensive and robust pre-generated 4D well spacing dataset that provides the ability to analyze spacing for U.S. onshore unconventional development. Calculated distance metrics, timing, boundedness and parent/child classifications are integrated with completion and zonal information to provide insights to development patterns that can yield optimal returns.
Geoscientists need detailed models, populated with as much well log, seismic and core data as possible. However, building and maintaining projects with subsurface data can be extremely time consuming. Enverus Subsurface Studio is a new GG&E interpretation software, built upon the top-tier Transform VI technology, with significant performance improvements to ensure the very best subsurface models, visual displays and reservoir insights. Subsurface Studio features the new PRISM Data Link to seamlessly combine Enverus data with your own data, accelerating the creation of robust subsurface models and allowing you to perform sophisticated subsurface analysis in minutes instead of weeks.
Assemble and bake
Now that we have all the ingredients, or inputs, we need to assess different scenarios that can optimize the asset for reduced costs and optimal productivity. And, to get the chefs working toward a single goal, we need all these important inputs in a single ecosystem, to be able to run development scenarios before putting any money in the ground.
Like baking, it might take a few tries to get the recipe just right. But, in oil and gas, that means spending millions of dollars. So, we need to be able to create multiple scenarios to de-risk the outcome and tweak our model using data science methods.
In the Eagle Ford, we analyzed different design scenarios using the completion sensitizer predicted model (an XGBoost Decision Tree).
In just a few minutes, we assessed the predicted oil and gas production results of different completion designs given the geological and spacing characteristics. We found that three operators on the western side of the play are not optimizing their design strategy and may want to consider changing their completion designs to maximize the economic return of their investment. This recommendation is from the model showing that fully bounded wells with large completion designs can negatively impact the NPV of the well due to the higher costs and marginal incremental increase in productivity over well designs with lesser proppant and fluid intensities that ultimately have a better economic return. The optimal spacing distance and amount of proppant and fluid intensities also vary based on the specific geologic parameters.
With the completion sensitizer model scenario refined from PRISM to create the optimal design, you can then build very specific type curves that reflect the scenario. Using a combination of Enverus’ robust production data blended with proprietary production, you can forecast all of the wells in your area of interest, create statistical typecurves normalized to an optimized completion design and export all of this to your reserves software for final economic analysis and recommendations.
Enverus solutions are built to support your workflows at every stage of the asset lifecycle.
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