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138 comments on Update on Megaproject Megaproject

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Stuart Staniford on December 10, 2007 - 7:03pm

I agree that tar sands projects represent the "long tail" of the composite ramp-up project - I've been amazed at the slow ramp-up of the ones I've looked at. But ramp-up is a more general issue - tar-sands is just a small (albeit extreme) case of it. My feeling is that we are going to have to have to try to get the largest sample we can manage of projects where we know both the first oil date and the date at which we reach plateau, construct a suitable estimated convolution function out of that sample, and then apply it to the new capacity estimates we have.

It's an important issue on which I will focus once I have some confidence that the lists are reasonably complete and correct. At the moment, the gross totals are still changing enough that I'm not ready to worry about the ramp-up issues.

Thanks for your help btw! Feel free to create an account over there so we can see your name in the history.

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razrmon on December 11, 2007 - 9:39am

I prefer your use of "tar" sands rather than the preceeding designation as "oil" sands.

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gregor on December 11, 2007 - 10:33am

Thanks for the reply, Stuart. When doing further work therefore on the tar sands projects, I will enter the expected peak production rate in the "Peak" column. As opposed to entering merely the expected production rate from the intial stage. (Wiki instructions: "Peak: maximum production expected (thousand barrels/day)."). Based on your remarks, you can then figure out how to handle the Long Tail, as you call it, of these staged projects in the sands.

So for example, I have Long Lake coming on next year with the figure of 60Kb/d entered in the "Peak" column, as their initial stage. I will change that therefore to the expected Peak rate, which, according to Nexen will eventually be about 240Kb/d.

Gregor

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Stuart Staniford on December 11, 2007 - 12:08pm

If the company breaks the overall development into separate phases with dates and production rates for each, we generally put each phase in as a separate project.

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