Modeling the Chance of Commerciality of Petroleum Assets for Economic Development

The chance to discover hydrocarbon volumes of economic quantity diminishes with progressive discovery in explored basins. Given the preponderance of smaller deposits in extensively explored basins and the cost implications of discovering deposits less than the required Minimum Economic Reserves (MER), explorationists and investors in exploration activities need a framework to evaluate the chance of a successful petroleum resources discovery to minimize the risk of unsuccessful exploration. This study develops a new framework to evaluate the chance of discovery of at least a minimum economic reserves volume in an extensively explored basin. It leverages on the postulation for the determination of probability of hydrocarbon economic success as a building block for the new framework. The model combines the concepts of Minimum Economic Reserves, Discovery Efficiency and Probability to derive an explicit analytical function for discovery efficiency and hydrocarbon probability for a commercial discovery. It digitalizes existing Risk Table to ease the complexity to obtain geological chance of success and hydrocarbon asset evaluation for commerciality. Nine Case studies from the prolific Niger Delta basin of Nigeria are used to validate the model. The result of the semi-digital solution of the model shows that three of the studied cases are commercial whereas the remaining six cases are sub-commercial. The study recommends the application of the new framework for hydrocarbon asset evaluation for chance of commerciality to complement models like the cream off curve to predict chance of commercial discovery of hydrocarbon assets.