N444 Development Planning For Mature Fields
Course Facts
- Course Code:
- N444
- Duration:
- 4 days
- Type:
- Classroom
- CEU:
- 3.2 Continuing Education Units
- PDH:
- 32 Professional Development Hours
- Certificate:
- Certificate Issued Upon Completion
Summary
This multidisciplinary course is designed to give participants a broad appreciation of the evaluation and planning activities associated with incremental development planning. This course takes groups through a wide range of associated issues, fills any knowledge gaps in the essential technical fundamentals required for mature field development planning and uses a case-based exercise which will run through the whole course.
This course equips participants with the knowledge and decision-making skills to create a robust development plan for mature fields.
Duration and Training Method
A four-day classroom course comprising lectures, worked examples, exercises and discussion.
Participants will learn to:
- Characterise the overall challenges associated with mature field developments.
- Evaluate critical insights from subsurface data and apply this to modelling options and recovery methods.
- Assess associated well data, typical late life issues and drilling and completion options for mature developments.
- Manage the role of risk and uncertainty when making mature field development planning decisions.
- Prepare a strategy and implementation plan.
Mature fields differ from greenfield developments in that major infrastructure is in place, static reservoir data has accumulated from development drilling and a growing volume of production data has become available. Decisions therefore relate to incremental projects, which may be small in scope and are often economically marginal. A firm understanding of the technical fundamentals associated with reservoir, wells and surface facilities is therefore required to make quality decisions in this environment, supported by an understanding of incremental project economics.
Challenges of mature field developments
• Open discussion covering smaller target sizes, costs, efficiencies, perceptions
Mature field development strategies
• What is strategy? The difference between green and brownfield decision making
• Framework (choices, boundaries, selection criteria, framing decisions)
• Evaluation methods
• Workflows, overview of tools
Mature oil fields
• Subsurface: getting insights from data (surveillance mapping), recovery mechanisms, modelling options (analytical, sector, full field), history matching, EOR
• Wells: understanding well data, typical late life issues (flow assurance), drilling and completion
options (including workovers)
• Surface: understanding surface data (including allocation), surface options e.g. debottlenecking
Mature gas fields
• Subsurface: insights from data, modelling options, gas condensate issues e.g. condensate banking
• Wells: gas issues e.g. liquid loading
• Surface: gas issues e.g. late life compression
Economics
• Typical economic decision making criteria
• The importance and pitfalls of incremental economics
• Finding the optimal development strategy
Decision making
• Evaluation methods
• Dealing with risk and uncertainty
• Biases in decision making
• How to make the best decision
Implementing and development managing the selected plan
• Building the plan
• Managing the plan when it goes off track
Wrap-up
Who should attend
The course is designed for mid-career subsurface professionals, specifically petroleum engineers and geoscientists who play a part in evaluating, screening and maturing oil and gas field development opportunities in mature fields. Participation would also benefit technical team leaders and managers who want to gain an insight into the challenges, uncertainties and preparations involved in development planning for mature fields.
Prerequisites and linking courses
There are no formal prerequisites for this course. This course is complimentary to other courses in the Nautilus Training Alliance programme focusing more generally on economics and risk including N014 (Petroleum Economics and Risk Analysis).
Click on a name to learn more about the instructor
Richard Oxlade
Richard Oxlade
Background
Richard Oxlade is an oil and gas industry advisor with a petroleum engineering background. He has over 35 years of oil and gas industry experience with a major operator (BP) and a consultancy (TRACS) in a range of technical, commercial, and leadership roles. He is recognised as a very strong analytical thinker who can cover strategic issues and deal with complexity and detail. He is respected for providing business advice at all levels of the organisation up to CEO level. He has a track record of working with multi-disciplinary teams, complemented by an enthusiasm for developing others through coaching and teaching.
Courses Taught
N006: An Introduction to Reservoir Engineering
N014: Petroleum Economics and Risk Analysis
N310: Carbonate Reservoir Modelling and Field Development Planning (Provence, France)
N444: Development Planning For Mature Fields
Dates for this Course
Related Courses
Related Subjects
“ "Very well presented and organized course, covering important topics from strategy to probability, economics and planning in a redevelopment project, and more importantly how to work as a team."”
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