Exploration Research to Evaluation – A New Way of Working

Abstract

Regional exploration and new basin entry teams leverage a combination of experience and new research to evaluate and high grade new areas to enter or explore. Often the research phase of the project involves extensive public document and information searches online ranging from published articles, conference proceedings, company reports, thesis, books etc. Research is then read, evaluated and then summarized into new opinions presented for high grading and supporting decisions to explore a new area or bare minimum assigning resources to evaluate further. This process is intuitive and second nature to the experienced geoscientists working in these teams and concepts around process improvement seen in other areas of upstream business process (e.g. well factory, lean, operational excellence) are rarely applied to the regional exploration workflows. However there are challenges in efficiencies for the regional teams – work is often repeated, research is not “stored”, insight from a particular research paper is not leveraged across teams, lessons learned are not shared, the ability to manage insight from multiple regional teams into a new exploration opportunity hopper is difficult. This paper shares a new technology led process for managing knowledge and information on projects from initial research to the generation of the evaluation report that puts “just enough” structure into the process to provide a common framework and new way of working for all exploration geologists, with the added benefit of providing line of sight for advisors and management on the “hopper” and naturally creates an evergreen “single source” and centralized history of all research (for all basins and potential fields). The approach leverages simple process improvement concepts from other segments within the upstream industry and applies them in a simple and effective way to the complex scientific process of research and evaluation of new basins and plays with significant results in efficiency and workflow improvements.

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90291 ©2017 AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition, Houston, Texas, April 2-5, 2017