High quality production forecasts encompassing the full range of inherent uncertainties are a requisite for a wide range of business practices in todays E&P companies. Production forecasting is key to many processes in the annual business planning cycle, for portfolio optimisation purposes and in field and area development planning. Failing to produce high quality production forecasts can have serious effects on profits, stock value and investment confidence.

IPRISKforecast, a member of the family of IPRISK tools, is specifically designed to improve companies' forecasting capabilities by providing a coherent approach to forecasting, from low-level aggregation of wells to corporate forecasting. IPRISKforecast is based on Microsoft Excel and Palisade @RISK and takes advantage of these products flexibility and familiarity.

Challenges in Production Forecasting

There are numerous challenges in generating high quality production forecasts:

• Production forecasting involves aggregation of uncertain elements at various levels: wells, fields, business units, countries and corporate level.
• On the well and field level, both existing and new wells and fields must be included.
• Forecasts will include combinations of assets ranging from producing reserves with large amount of data (and high confidence) to recent discoveries and even undrilled prospects with very limited data (and low confidence).
• There is also an increasing demand for forecasting production on assets where secondary or tertiary recovery techniques are being used.

Production forecasts do not only need to include subsurface uncertainty. Attention must also be given to other sources of uncertainty such as:

• Facility and transport constraints
• Various types of scheduled and un-scheduled deferments (e.g. downtime).
• In some geographical areas commercial arrangements and environmental and political risks should also be considered.

IPRISKforecast is a stochastic aggregation tool that improves a company`s forecasting capabilities by providing a coherent approach to forecasting across the company, from low-level aggregation of wells to corporate forecasting. At any level, the tool allows the user to perform detailed analyses of the resulting aggregated forecasts to get a thorough understanding of the main uncertainties. Predefined result plots and management reports are readily available to provide an overview of the analyses regardless of detail.

Features and Options
Provided below is a selection of features and options in IPRISKforecast. The tool can easily be customised to suit specific needs.

Aggregation Level

• Wells => Asset
• Assets=> Field
  
• Fields => Business Unit
• Business Units => Country
• Countries => Corporate

Elements

• Existing Wells
• New Wells
• Existing Production
• New Production
• Existing Capacities
• New Capacities
• Scheduled Deferments
• Un-scheduled Deferments
• Commercial Arrangements
• Environmental & Political Risks

Input Data Handling

• Flexible input formats
• Distribution selection
• Best-fit algorithm

Results

• Corporate / Country / Business Unit / Asset / Field Level
• Conditional / Un-Conditional Results
• Oil / Associated Gas / Non-Associated Gas / Condensate
• Dependency Trees
• Contribution by element
• Tornado Plots
• Summary Tables