American Oil and Gas Reporter - May 2016 - 39

between screening and full-blown economic runs. If the company decides it
wants to take an acquisition opportunity
to the next level, the same engineering
and data from the quick-look analysis
can be used within the same software to
conduct a full-scale engineering study.
Engineers' time is too valuable to have
to restart the process by switching to another program and starting over on a
more detailed property evaluation.
Quick-Look Evaluation
This approach was applied on a 100well dataset with the challenge of completing
an evaluation within 10 minutes. It took
about five minutes for the software to autoforecast all 100 wells and the engineer to
audit the results multiple times. In another
five minutes, the engineer used the software
to build economic cases, run price decks,
build a type well, do analog forecasting,
and run a brief drilling schedule.
Some managers may question whether
they really can trust the results from such
a fast evaluation. However, because the
engineer is still able to leverage his expertise in conducting the analysis, users
can be confident in auto-forecasted results
and in making basic engineering decisions
based on suggestions made by the application.
Even so, it can take time to build the
necessary trust to let software handle
forecasting functions. Engineers must
make software vendors prove that trust,
and run an application several times to
see how it holds up.
As noted, several key software attributes
are needed to enable an optimal 10minute producing property evaluation.
The ability to generate multiple forecasts
simultaneously is important for setting
up parameters for viewing low-, midand high-side cases to compare multiple
scenarios and determine which forecast
is most realistic. The software must allow
users to make decisions in-line and run
all the economics to compare alternative
scenarios and forecasts.
Being able to run break-even analyses
and build type wells within the application
also is crucial. The user needs to know if
the price decks make sense, or if they are
too high or too low. Do the break-even
results warrant moving forward on an
acquisition analysis, or are they too negative to merit further consideration? The
ability to build type wells within the
same economics application workflow
maximizes efficiencies and allows the
engineer to focus on the evaluation rather
than on exporting or importing data.
A quick drilling schedule generated
in economics software is not something

the reserves engineer is going to send to
the drilling department, but if an oil and
gas company has an interest in buying a
property, managers will need to have a
quick, back-of-the envelope idea of what
the drilling program would look like.
A 10-minute A&D evaluation is not
intended to provide the final answer on a
property acquisition or engineering decision. However, it creates a workflow to
maximize the efficiencies of engineering
evaluations to give organizations a powerful advantage in identifying the most
promising acquisition opportunities while
the competition is still importing data
and making manual forecasts.
❒

RYAN MOHRMAN is a senior
reservoir engineer at Energy Navigator in Houston. He specializes in
database integration and architecture,
engineering workflows such as reserves management, A&D evaluations
and basin studies, and reporting and
analytics. Mohrman joined the company in 2013 as a technical sales engineer for its integrated reserves engineering and economic analysis software. He holds a B.S. in petroleum
engineering from Texas A&M University.

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American Oil and Gas Reporter - May 2016

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