Minimum Economic Field Size Limit Analysis in Navigating Exploration Risks for Malaysia’s Deepwater Gas field

Operators pursue deepwater exploration due to the significant untapped hydrocarbon resources, providing a crucial means to meet global energy demand. Technological advancements in drilling and subsea technologies, have made it feasible to explore and extract petroleum reserves. Nevertheless, investing in deepwater projects has many risks because of their unique challenges, such as technical issues and operational difficulties. In delving into the intricacies of exploration risk, it is imperative to set forth the steps used to estimate the potential risk assessment process.

To tackle the risks linked to marginal volumes, establishing a MEFS limit is important, ensuring exploration activities stay not only sustainable but also profitable. The key components of MEFS limit analysis typically include geologic risk assessment, resource-size distribution, development cost, discount rate consideration, estimation of minimum required resources, most likely development scenario, risk analysis and sensitivities studies. The purpose of this paper is to present a case study for Malaysia’s deepwater field by incorporating several sensitivity analyses to ensure that we have acceptable range of MEFS in the case of gas discovery.