Advanced Spreadsheet Software for Oil and Gas Exploration from Decision Strategies, Inc.
Palisade software can be used to analyze any decision, course of action, or process. Our software is used by professionals across a surprising range of disciplines.
Few analyses are more burdened with uncertainty than estimating the volumes of oil and/or gas that might be encountered in an exploration prospect, or group of prospects. It is not uncommon for the range of possible success-case volume outcomes for an exploration prospect to span several orders of magnitude.
In the past, explorationists often generated one map of a prospect and would make the assumption that the map constituted a ‘best guess’ as to what might be discovered. Post-drill ‘lookback’ studies have shown that such an approach was generally optimistic – often wildly so. Business decisions based upon this type of analysis often led to disastrous results.
Most companies have come to realize the advantages of capturing the full spectrum of possible outcomes in analyzing undrilled prospects, or families of prospects. The problem has been that many companies haven’t had the resources to develop software to model the many different scenarios that they encounter in their day-to-day operations – for instance, multi-objective or amplitude-related prospects – and software packages available on the market are expensive.
Decision Strategies, Inc has developed a suite of user-friendly, straightforward, and flexible software products for oil and gas companies to manage the risk analysis process in a proper and consistent way. These products are specialized Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that are powered by @RISK. They are designed to handle the assessment of pre-drill chance and volumes for all common exploration scenarios, ranging from single-objective prospect to an entire geologic play, as well as manage the decision-making process for discoveries, from small fields to commercialization of megaprojects.
Versions of the suite are now utilized by more than 20 companies, ranging from small independents to national and multinational oil companies.
Documentation in the form of a User’s Manual, and embedded help/hint screens, remove many of the ‘pitfalls’ from the process and assure consistency of inputs. The screen below shows the embedded help from a portion of 2-Objective Prospect.
The 2-Objective Prospect module.