Industry Discussion Panel: Best Practices in Oil and Gas Reserve Evaluation and Economic Analysis

Oil and gas reserve evaluation is an important component of the upstream business. If you want to determine whether to develop a reservoir, buy or sell a field, or attract investment in your company, reserve evaluation enables you to make that decision. A reserves evaluation is the process of forecasting estimated petroleum volumes, anticipated to be commercially, economically and technically recoverable from producing and planned wells in known oil and gas accumulations. Reserves evaluation is the process of forecasting the production of existing and planned wells and using these forecasts in combination with economic data to estimate monetary value. Economic analysis is part of the evaluation process and using various scenarios will enable a company prioritize opportunities based on some key performance indicators like NPV, IRR, ROR, and payout.

The challenge for new, and even experienced reserve engineers, circles around best practices in the evaluation process. While a new engineer grapples with the basics of the evaluation process like where to get started when tasked with evaluating an asset, experienced engineers want to develop a consistent, repeatable, and “reproducible” process using best practices. Some of the questions we will focus on are:

• What is an oil and gas reserve?
• How do you evaluate an asset?
• What are some of the best practices used in the industry for evaluating a property?
• How has the evaluation process changed over the years?

To answer these questions, we have put together a panel of four industry experts with over 95 years of experience.