As wrong decisions become more and more costly, software providers are developing tools to make the right decisions easier to come by.

If you're drilling a shallow well in the Illinois Basin, it might be cheaper to drill a dry hole than to develop a complete reservoir characterization and simulation model prior to drilling.

In other environments, however, examining the data prior to drilling the well can save enormous sums of money.

Companies like Landmark Graphics have long been in the business of bringing computer power and analytical tools to the decision-making process. As computers have become faster and more powerful, it's possible to run endless scenarios to determine which development solution will make the most sense. Landmark has taken advantage of this by introducing DecisionSpace DMS.

"Oil companies have to strike a balance between maximum recovery and meeting their fiscal targets," Scot Evans, director of reservoir management for Landmark, said. "The world is littered with huge fields that aren't on production for economic reasons."

To help its clients strike that balance, Landmark has introduced a product that integrates and manages any number of possible combinations of technical, cost, timing and economic factors to estimate net present value (NPV) for multiple project scenarios. It also estimates the range of uncertainty for numerous project variables and uses sensitivity analysis to highlight which variables pose the greatest risk to asset performance. And it can simulate multiple reservoir, drilling, facilities and economic scenarios so that asset teams can model all of the alternatives, leading to more confident field development decisions and accelerated decision cycle times.

Meanwhile, Spotfire's DecisionSite analytic application enables companies to sift through disparate types of data in a number of very visual and interactive ways to find information that wouldn't be obvious in a tabular or spreadsheet format. Its geographical information system (GIS) integration capabilities, found in the recently introduced DecisionSite MapConnect, allow users of Spotfire and ESRI ArcGIS to quickly generate maps showing select data points - for instance, all wells in the Gulf of Mexico encountering a certain type of lithology at a certain depth. It has partnered with several other vendors to enhance its access to oil and gas technical and business data

So a business reseller partnership between the two companies was inevitable. Rather than competing, the Spotfire component is, according to Evans, very complementary to the DMS workflow. A particularly intriguing aspect of Spotfire is a "guided analytics" capability that enables users to track their workflows, record them and make them available to others collaborating on the project.

"Spotfire lets the users sift though the data and see what's driving the economics," Evans said. In other words, the nuts-and-bolts data that are behind the simulations can be tracked a number of ways, so that different members of an asset team can better understand the "why" of any given decision.

In one case study, a new-field discovery in a harsh environment resulted in an initial development scenario of 45 new wells, which were expected to tap about 700 MM boe. The asset team had just 2 months to complete its analysis. Within that time, it had to analyze multiple scenarios of reservoir quality and prodibility, including cap pressure and relative permeability, the presence or absence of an aquifer, etc. Well locations and quantity needed to be determined, drilling and production needed to be scheduled, gas and water injection scenarios needed to be run, and the impact of the cost of surface facilities on the economics needed to be assessed.

The team ran 90 full-physics simulations to evaluate revised production and economic restraints, and within 3 weeks it had illuminated specific sensitivities on economics such as production constraints, well placement and completion, and transportation cost.

For more information, visit www.lgc.com or www.spotfire.com.



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