Predicting The Future... Kebohongan, Kebohongan Statistic dan Belum Menemukan

Abstract

All exploration companies and governments want to predict the future as to what their exploration efforts can and might deliver and over the last 50 years or so various methods have developed within the wider E&P industry to deliver these estimates. The estimates form a key part of a company’s decision making process as to which basin or play to invest in and for a government the estimates impact what fiscal incentives might be offered to attract foreign investment and it will influence how much they might fund their NOC to find and exploit these predicted “Yet to Find” resources (YTF). These predictions are thus strategically important and are widely discussed and debated however beyond the geological community they are very poorly understood and they are often politicised for various reasons. All yet to find estimates are geological guesses and, like models, all are wrong but some are useful. In this paper we will show how “creaming curves” are useless as are any numbers that come from geochemical/basin modelling software tools which frequently produce animated outputs and hence always impress management. The methodology presented in this paper suggests that meaningful quicklook estimates can be made with just statistical data but these are limited to the proven portions of any basin (or play) where fields (or pools) already exist. Predicting beyond these areas into unproven (unexplored or heavily explored areas) is more difficult since the reasons for any exploration failures present need to be incorporated into any evaluation together with an estimation of the number and size of the future prospects that might be present. At the end of time its the understanding the basic petroleum geology and exploration history of different basins in a structured way that always underpins any quality regional multi-basin Yet to Find ranking project and this is always a collective effort by multiple geoscientists who should be using an agreed common prospect and play evaluation methodology and collecting their evaluations into a single database that can be updated (made evergreen) as data/knowledge changes and exploration proceeds into the future.

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90354 © 2019 AAPG Asia Pacific Technical Symposium, The Art of Hydrocarbon Prediction: Managing Uncertainties, Bogor, (Greater Jakarta), Indonesia, August 7-8, 2019