Oil- and gas-resource assessment in certain South American Basins—An application of ARDS (Ver. 5.0) to complex exploration and discovery histories |
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Authors: | Lawrence J Drew John H Schuenemeyer |
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Institution: | (1) U.S. Geological Survey, 954 National Center, 20192 Reston, Virginia |
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Abstract: | The modified Arps-Roberts Discovery Process Modeling System ARDS (Ver. 4.01)] has recently been upgraded ARDS (Ver. 5.0)]
and applied to a wide variety of field discovery and wildcat drilling data with differing characteristics. ARDS is designed
to forecast the number and sizes of undiscovered fields in an exploration play or basin by using historical drilling and discovery
data. Fields used as input may be grown or ungrown. Two models for field growth—one offshore and the other onshore—have been
implemented (Schuenemeyer and Drew, 1996). Uncertainty attributable to field growth is estimated via simulation. This upgrade
of ARDS has been designed to handle situations when the data cannot be partitioned into homogeneous regions, but where estimation
of the number of remaining oil and gas fields is still meaningful. In this upgrade of ARDS, many restrictions, which include
those on the number of fields and wildcat wells required to forecast the size distribution of the oil and gas fields that
remain to be discovered in an exploration play, a basin, or other target area, have been removed. In addition, flexibility
has been gained by reforming the criteria for convergence of the model. In all, 32 basins and subbasins in South America were
examined, 18 of which had sufficient data to be amenable to forecasting the field-size distribution of undiscovered oil and
gas resources directly by using the Petroconsultants Inc. (1993) field discovery and wildcat drilling data. Overall, ARDS
(Ver. 5.0) performed well in estimating the field-size distribution of undiscovered oil and gas resources in the 18 basins
and subbasins. The aggregate volume of undiscovered petroleum resources was characterized by using histograms of the distribution
of resources and the following five statistics: the mean, the 80% trimmed mean, and the 10,50 (median), and 90 quantiles.
More than 38 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) in fields that contain more than one million BOE individually were forecast
as remaining to be discovered. The largest basin, the Campos (Brazil), is forecast to contain nearly 10 billion BOE undiscovered
resources. The East Venezuela Basin (excluding the Furrial Trend) is forecast to contain about 8 billion BOE; the Austral-Magallanes
Basin (Argentina and Chile), about 7 billion BOE; and the Napo (Colombia and Ecuador) and the Neuquen (Argentina) Basins,
between 3 billion and 4 billion BOE. A subset of these basins that illustrate the increased flexibility of ARDS are discussed. |
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Keywords: | Oil- and gas-resource assessment discovery process modeling Arps-Roberts South America |
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