Exploration Area Evaluation

Exploration teams often face difficult decisions:

• Which exploration areas should be acquired?

• What hydrocarbon volumes can realistically be expected?

• Which prospects should be drilled first?

Answering these questions requires integrating regional geology, petroleum system analysis, drilled well assessment, and play fairway mapping.

This course provides a practical workflow for play-based evaluation of petroleum basins, using regional geological information and drilled well results to calculate risked hydrocarbon volumes for any exploration license area within a basin.

• Analyze basin-scale geologic data, identify petroleum plays and make structural and depositional domain maps

• Assess resource density variation using trap density and average lead volume estimates for different basin domains

• Create common risk polygon maps for every play and estimate shared and independent chance of geologic success

• Calculate in-place hydrocarbon volumes across exploration areas/licenses using resource density and chance of geologic success maps

• Identify the drilling sequence of exploration prospects within a license area that produces the highest value

• Exploration geologists and geophysicists

• Exploration team leaders

• Petrophysicists, Reservoir engineers and Economists who support exploration teams