Auditable Reserves Reference Database

This case study demonstrates how Serafim FUTURE can add substantial value to your reserves management and audit workflows through the successful experience of one of our clients.

Summary

A fast growing oil and gas company, with international operations, required a more secure and manageable reserves forecasting and auditing process. The aim was to allow the company’s executives to quickly identify and approve reference forecasts that would be used for reporting, planning and control purposes.

The Challenge

As a fast growing company, the number of assets, asset teams and reservoir engineers boomed in recent years. Production and number of wells also grew rapidly making it harder to track and store reference production forecasts used for calculating the reported economic reserves.

Define a clear workflow and trace how your forecasts were generated.

Moreover, the variety of assets entailed the use of a range of forecasting methods from reservoir simulations to decline curves analyses. The auditing and aggregation of numerous production profiles generated by different means and stored in disparate locations under different formats made it even trickier to build the big picture and to control the process.

Executives at the client firm realised that improvements to their formal reserves calculations would certainly lead to improvements of their bottom line results.

Managing production profiles

Managing production profiles effectively and quickly is a source of competitive advantage for the producing firm. Effectiveness is created by the ability to combine, shift and change numerous production profiles for a large number of entities accurately, timely, securely and using the relevant inputs.

At any stage of the process, engineers need to have a good knowledge of the manipulations and calculations occurring and avoid unforeseen errors.

Spreadsheets, the usual tool utilised to carry out such tasks, fail to provide almost all of the requirements listed above.

Moreover, storage, security and workflow modelling are not supported by a simple spreadsheet model even though each one of them is important to the performance and profile of the firm

The solution

Our client, who have taken the lead in the use and development of Serafim FUTURE, have integrated the use of Future in their business process and as a result were aware of the benefits it can yield in such situations.

Future, both the database utility and the software front end, provide a robust answer to the business challenge that our client faced.◊

Serafim FUTURE

• provides decline curve analysis for producing wells, including the innovative C-curve method
• allows gas production forecasting by decline curve, material balance or, for associated gas, by the free-gas:liquid ratio method
• imports the results of reservoir simulation or external material balance models
• allows one to work with a range (e.g. high, medium and low cases) of production profiles for each asset.
• aggregates well forecasts to field and platform level, applying, if necessary, production
• constraints, without the errors that so often creep into spreadsheets
• rapidly updates profiles with the results of changes in well start-up dates and drilling sequences
• stores all inputs and settings, so these can be audited
• produces reports listing differences in inputs and settings between two cases

Our clients say that Future saves two weeks of work per engineer and per reserves update exercise.

Future allowed the technical generation of the forecasts to be integrated into a standardised workflow, and provided tools for management of the workflow. Read and write permissions were specified per run. Forecasts were created, updated, approved and frozen so that no further changes were possible. Serafim Ltd is currently helping this client to create an even more versatile administrator control system that will allow the permissions and approvals to be specified at several layers - concession/asset/ field etc.

Even though our client set up a corporate Future database on MS SQL Server, the software still allows a great deal of flexibility for users:

• Personal local databases that is directly accessible via either Future software or utilities such as MS Access.
• Results and models from one database can be copied to the other.
• Reference approved or frozen forecasts can be used as the basis for new forecasts – such as for the next reserves cycle.
• Future is equipped with utilities that allows direct communication with databases, such as Schlumberger OFM (production and well test information) and VOLTS (reserves reporting).

Results

Our client reckons that the use of Serafim FUTURE allowed them to save two weeks of every engineer’s time per year just when using it throughout the reserves reporting exercise. The benefits of workflow management, security and reliability of data have been widely noticed, especially during official audits.

Click here to learn more how we can help you save time, ensure consistency and achieve reliability with you reserves management/audit workflows.