A Framework for Expert Judgment to Assess Oil and Gas Resources

In frontier areas, where well data are sparse, many organizations have used expert judgment to estimate undiscovered resources. In this process, several important issues arise. How should the knowledge be elicited? At what level of aggregation (geologic process model, play, petroleum system, country, etc.) should the assessment be performed? How and at what stage of the assessment process should feedback be given to assessors? Is independent replication of estimates possible? How are issues of dependency treated? When and how should uncertainty be specified? The context for this presentation will be the methodology used in the US Geological Survey's 1998 1002-Arctic National Wildlife Refuge assessment of oil and gas resources.