Tentative Technical Agenda
Sunday Evening, 11 October
Icebreaker and Dinner
Monday Morning, 12 October
Session 1: A(nother) Forecast for Every Occasion
Session Managers: Paul Armitage and Erwin Kroemer
Why do we produce and how reliable are our production forecasts? Who uses them? Do we really need to create different forecasts for the same asset for different customers, such as Senior Management, Finance Departments, economic evaluations, regulators, and others? Is it worth the effort we expend? We will discuss own experiences, alternatives, and possible future options for improvement.
Monday Evening
Session 2: Risk and Uncertainty - How to expect the unexpected?
Session Managers: Gilbert Scott
This session aims to highlight the challenges facing the industry to incorporate the diversity of risks and uncertainties both in reservoir understanding and in the wider environment into robust production forecasts. How do we know what we don't know? How can we encompass both data and modelling uncertainties? What about unexpected events? How do we allow for "train wrecks" or "jackpots"? How should we combine individual uncertainties into a portfolio forecast?
Tuesday Morning, 13 October
Session 3: Integration – Technology
Session Managers: Paul Arkley and Mark Lochmann
Do we have the methodologies and technology to effectively integrate all the data and generate our production forecasts? Production forecasts are often based on an integrated analysis of all the subsurface information – but that’s not enough. The reality is that other factors often intervene to impact production. Examples include flow assurance problems, operational changes or failure elsewhere in the system (e.g. host platform power supply). Then there are external factors like partner positions, funding and the weather. How should we handle uncertainties in the scenario? Do we take a sufficiently system-wide view? Even if we can quantify the uncertainties in the production forecast, how should we communicate it so that effective business decisions can be made?
Tuesday Afternoon
Session 4: Surveillance and Technology; can we really leave forecasting to computers?
Session Managers: Philip Marlow and Andrew White
With the recent flood of papers on the “automated oil field” and service companies encouraging us to rely on information from smart wells and integrated well site data systems, can we forecast automatically? What essential ingredients to engineers bring to the equation and can we simply use engineering resources to check automated forecasts in the future. Could automation give a more systematic approach or will it lead to data delusion?
Wednesday Morning, 14 October
Session 5: Life Cycle - Short – Long term
Session Managers: Erwin Kroemer and Greg Birrell
Pressure maintenance, IOR, blow-down – is forecasting the different stages in the life cycle of our fields fundamentally different? From the impact of adjusting offshore valves on the next hour’s production to when will the oil run out – who really needs all those predictions, and can we deduce the different views from only one model? There must be better ways to apply the available predictive tools for more reliable forecasts at every stage of field life, let us explore the options!
Wednesday Evening
Session 6: Feeding the corporate machine; how best to represent forecasts at a corporate level
Session Managers: Paul Armitage and Philip Marlow
How will reporting requirements increase depending on the size and financing of the company, in view of the new economic reality? What systems do we need for effective regulatory reporting such as SEC? How should we aggregate our well, field and regional forecasts to give a representative and statistically robust company-wide view? What methods should we use to account for major threats to the forecasts like Hurricane Ike or a major transportation system failing? Do we know which industries are doing better in this regard? Should we develop new techniques?
Thursday Morning, 15 October
Session 7: Methods: how will we forecast more efficiently?
Session Managers: Mark Lochmann and Kes Heffer
A continuation from session 3 in looking to the future for improved methods of forecasting with focus on, for example: What errors are associated with data and models used in forecasting and how can we identify and combine them (e.g. stochastic integrated asset modelling)? When are mechanistic simulation models and analytical statistical models respectively more useful, and are other methodologies in prospect? How do we combine optimization with forecasting?
Thursday Afternoon
Session 8: Behaviour
Session Managers: Donald Zmick
What emphasis is placed on verification in organisations, and what resources are expended in doing so? How does company culture (level of accountability or even fear) impact the level of verification? How are assurance reviews, model validations, etc documented and how does this affect re-work. With the introduction of new techniques, workflows or tools, haw are change management initiatives affected by verification, what are the tradeoffs? From a decision quality perspective, are we too focused on absolutes; should we be looking for relative strengths of different strategies of insights about our projects (from models) – in other words do we do too much verification?
Friday Morning, 16 October
Session 9: Getting to Robust Production Forecasts
Session Managers: Peter Brand and Heikki Jutila
The final session of the forum will collate the ideas discussed and look at ways of closing the gaps that have been identified during the week.
