oa Business-focused Play Analysis

Over the last few years, Maersk has developed a play analysis technique aimed directly at helping the company make decisions on where to explore by identifying areas of high prospectivity, predicting future discoveries within these areas, estimating finding costs and economic value and comparing to other regions in a consistent way. The technique involves screening regional data and historical drilling results, delineating sweetspots, quantifying the undrilled potential and high grading those areas that rank highly based on a set of criteria, including commercial risk, size of prize, yet-to-find (YTF) richness and profit (Figure 1). Our experience is that better technical evaluations come out of play analyses where the emphasis is on understanding hydrocarbon charge, gross structure, thickness trends, number and size of traps and economics than those focusing on facies and depositional environments. The process has proved to be efficient and allows technical staff to quickly focus on the key issues in high graded areas, particularly on identifying and evaluating new prospects and comparing them to features already drilled. The ranking and attractiveness of individual sweetspots is continually reassessed on this basis.