About this Workshop

Abstract

In October 2009, an SPE forum series meeting was held in Cadiz, Spain, entitled “Getting to Robust Production Forecasts.” This was a very lively meeting with excellent discussions and contributions. The discussions covered all aspects of production forecasting, however no clear consensus emerged on what is a ‘good’ production forecast, and many people felt that there was a need for more best practice guidelines.

Following this forum, a small group of the attendees decided to do something about this. A steering committee was set up under the auspices of the SPE. It was decided that a ‘Reprint Book’ of papers on production forecasting, followed by a series of SPE workshops taking place around the world over the next 5 years, would help encourage discussion of the issues. The intention is to use these SPE workshops to help improve understanding of production forecasting and to eventually develop production forecasting guidelines which are broadly accepted across the industry.

The resulting document will be organized into sections, including the following topics:

• Glossary of production forecasting
• What is a good production forecast?
• How do we learn from bad forecasts?
• Impact of production engineering and operational field management
• Uncertainties on production forecasting
• Reservoir management and field reserves
• Production forecasts for financial decision making
• Forecasts for national and international bodies

Learnings from each workshop will be collected and edited into a scribe report posted online and accessible by all of the series participants. Each posted report will build on those that came before it and participants are encouraged to comment on and discuss further the topics of these postings as part of an SPE online community.

Who Should Attend?

The workshop is meant for experienced individuals who will share their own case histories and experience, and will actively contribute to the discussion. However, all other professionals who are looking for clearer guidelines on production forecasting are encouraged to attend the workshops to communicate their training needs and gaps. This is a topic with a broad scope so we would expect participants to include reservoir, petroleum and production engineers and managers from all areas of the business who are involved in the production forecasting process.

The following business areas will be represented:

• Oil companies
• Service companies
• Governments and regulatory authorities
• Financial institutions