Khebab,

As you probably know log/normal distributions also dominate decline rates for certain reservoir drives. While estimates during the early life stages can be tricky, estimates toward the far end of reserve life become virtually straight lines. Even when secondary recover efforts or additional late life redrilling takes place it usually just represents just an upward vertical shift in the trend with the decline exponent changing very little.

I was actually thinking about the potential of your knowledge base of reservoir dynamics combined with his math skills. It would be interesting to see a stepwise change in his model towards field specific modifications of some of the mega reserves that carrying much of the current output.

If well production profiles is a lot shorter than the total oil production I guess that the shape of the total oil production is almost unaffected by the shape of the production.

The long tail is missing in the production profiles. A simple approximation could be made by making the area of the current production profile a little bit smaller and adding it with a long flat triangle. This a nodal basis and it could be constructed very easy by using two hat functions and a mesh there the points are at the four years [production start, peak, tertiary recovery?, production stop].

From my experience, just getting good info on the value and the time of maximum production per field as well as an estimation of the average decline rate is enough to get a good approximation of the region production profile (see comment on Norway below). Now, you can develop a more sophisticated field model with a production plateau for instance but it does not imporve the result that much and requires much more information per field.

Agree as well. There is something to be said about not overanalyzing a specific region. The macro trends wash out any micro trends as you aggregate these smaller loglet or shocklet functions (loglet is Khebab's idea and I volunteer the shocklet to provide a mnenomic for the oil shock model)