Prospect and Play Assessment - PPA

Exploration professionals and managers must manage their time and resources carefully in the modern business world. Key to this management process is a full understanding of exploratory opportunities and their potential impact on the organization. Assessment of plays and prospects is an important tool in managing financial and human resources. This fully revised and updated course has evolved from an approach created through the work of Dave White into a fully modern approach to defining prospect and play volumetrics, uncertainties in defining these volumes and the risk that the accumulation exists. It is a practical course, easy to adapt directly in the workplace. During the course, participants learn evaluation techniques applicable in any assessment scheme that an organization might use. The course evaluates other published approaches and contrasts them with the recommended procedures allowing the participants to choose the very best approach to resource evaluation. This course offers the industry quantitative play and prospect assessment procedures that are consistent and repeatable allowing for direct comparisons play to play or prospect to prospect. In addition, the methods offers measures of the play prospectiveness based on the number and resource size distribution of potential future fields. The course objectives are: (1) to provide knowledge and unique tools for practical, systematic, predrill assessment of potentially recoverable oil and gas; (2) to use the best available methods - trap volumetrics and hydrocarbon charge for prospects, and potential numbers and sizes of prospects for plays; (3) to quantify all geologic risks and uncertainties using hand calculations; and, (4) to provide insights for managers and reviewers in evaluating assessments, avoiding pitfalls, high-grading exploration opportunities, and planning selectively for the future. It focuses on the exploration concepts and models that are essential to effective assessments. The concepts and techniques learned in the course are applied to real industry examples in exercises and workshops.Tools include comprehensive assessment forms for prospects and plays, and graphs, data tables, and guidelines for making all assessment decisions. These tools help participants estimate risks and success ratios, field-size distributions, field and prospect densities, trap geometry corrections, multiple reservoir factors, porosities, permeabilities, saturations, formation volume factors, gas/oil ratios, formation temperatures, oil and gas recovery efficiencies, API gravities, gas gravities, NGL ratios, and oil and gas yields from source rocks. The forms and procedures are easily adaptable for internal usage in any oil and gas organization. Adoption of these would result in a consistent assessment scheme and allow for equitable comparisons of opportunities across the company and can serve as a basis for benchmarking company exploration performance. All factors can be handled in either metric or English units. Calculations are simple, but participants will find a basic hand calculator helpful.

All exploration team members and leaders including geologists, geophysicists, geochemists, analysts, reservoir engineers, economists, planners and managers who make business decisions based upon exploration data.

You will Learn:

Participants will learn how to:

• Calculate geological risk and uncertainty in exploration prospects
• Determine prospect resource volume estimates
• Assess resource distribution in a play
• Predict the number and size distribution of potential future fields in a play
• Describe and calibrate risks associated with discovering a successful play