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154 comments on World Crude Oil Production Forecast using Current Fields and Future Megaprojects

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Luis de Sousa on December 28, 2006 - 1:26pm

Hi ace, interesting post. I imagine it took some amount of work, thank you for that.

From these tow sentences:

The annual decline rates vary from 4% for new fields, 6% for mature field workovers, 7% for mature fields to 14%
[…]
Each production forecast for a megaproject assumes simplistically that peak production starts on day 1 and decreases according to the corresponding annual decline rate.

I understand that once a field comes on stream it goes immediately into decline. That doesn’t sound very good, It was like this that you modeled it? It’s a bit awkward, even for offshore exploration there’s usually a production plateau, giving a “boot like” production profile.

I also think that you are using decline rates somewhat high. Decline rates in excess of 10% indeed happen, but it’s not usual to observe such numbers for the entire cycle.

Anyway a good effort and a good concept of introducing different decline rates for different kind of projects. Can you obtain data for the mega-projects of the last, say, 5 years? If so, you could try these models on that data to get an idea how they work.

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WebHubbleTelescope on December 28, 2006 - 5:12pm

I use a combination of maturation rate and extraction rates to model this situation. The end result is a convolution of two exponentials, leading to something akin to a gamma distribution of order 2. An infinite extraction rate would correspond to a situation where all the taps were turned on at exactly the same time and at full extraction rate. In practice, after construction completes each will get turned on at a slightly different deferred time and with different ramp-up times. This puts the production plateau away from Time=0, or which as Luis describes leads to a production plateau.

This has a basis in stochastic modeling, and of course works best when one considers a range of fields that can be described by a statistical average for maturation and extraction (as well as fallow and construction times). I call it the oil shock model.

BTW, the best example of something that doesn't follow this general trend is the North Slope/Prudhoe Bay where it looks like the late completion of the Alaska Pipeline allowed the taps to immediately start flowing which leads to an almost immediate peak in production, i.e. the maturation was obscured by the concurrent initiation of a high-throughput delivery mechanism, which essentially deferred the production from gradual to steep.

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