E&P Economics, Strategy, Oil and Gas Property Valuations, Reserve Quantification and Classification.

• Economic Valuation Assessment Lens-EVAL is our proprietary, industry standard, economic analytics platform, which we developed because we wanted a more flexible, easy-to-use tool than was then available in the market to evaluate and cross compare the many different investment opportunities in the exploration and production segment of the oil and gas business. The analytical engine is integrated with the R statistical/graphics program to provide access to industry leading statistical tools for, among other purposes, performing stochastic modeling and Monte Carlo simulations. After all, some call shale plays statistical plays, and the integration of  R and EVAL has proved insightful for this very reason. 

  • We have used EVAL to run innumerable evaluations of oil and gas investments of all types, including:  light, tight oil prospects; shale gas wells; deepwater projects; LNG installations; and oil sands investments.  Also integrated into the coding are modules to evaluate non-North American opportunities, such as those being developed under production sharing contracts (PSC).

  • Other uses have included determining minimum purchase/sales prices for A&D, modeling forward production profiles for investment analysis, incremental economics to evaluate the efficacy of introducing new technologies, and incrementally comparing investing in different asset types to determine how best to allocate limited capex budgets.

  • Because of the flexible architecture used to craft the analytical engine, we can easily modify it for the specifics of any upstream oil and gas situation.

  • R also allows us to output results into presentation quality, easy-to-interpret graphs and summaries, which in turn are printed into an easily transmitted format that can be read by smart phones, notepads, laptops, personal computers, etc.  Essentially:  print once, read by any.

• Our extensive economic analyses for clients has generated a broad and deep database of cost and well performance for all E&P settings, but especially for the onshore North American nonconventional sector.  Here our data ranges from the earliest days of the Barnett shale play, to the most recent multiwell, multi-horizon pad in the Delaware Basin.

Extensive and specialized expertise in the ongoing transformation of the oil and gas industry due to rapid advances in technology, especially fracking.

• Frack_It is our proprietary upstream activity assessment tool/database.  Frack_It gives us in-depth insight into the onshore North American drilling and fracking markets because it allows us to accurately estimate activity as a function of oil and gas prices (and by extension for all manner of other oil field services and technologies, including coiled tubing, completion rigs, sand, trucking, etc.)  Uniquely amoung such approaches, we have grounded it in the economics of the industry using EVAL.This allows us to not only forecast activity in the aggregate, but for over 50 individual shale gas and light, tight oil plays in both the US and Canada.

• This tool was developed under the sponsorship and in conjuction with one of our long time clients, a large supplier to the fracking industry with a detailed, sophisticated understanding of upstream activity.  Our interaction with this client for over a decade has allowed us to continuously reality check the output of the tool against what is happening on the ground, and refine it accordingly until at present we believe it is the industry leader in its ability to determine play level frack hhp demand, frack crew levels and demand for drilling rigs.

• Another key tool supporting Frack_It is a database containing the operational details for thousands of horizontal, multi-stage fracked wells.  The data includes wellbore schematics, directional surveys, AFE and "as spent" costs, drilling histories, completion summaries, which contain the activity logs describing the fracing operations for these wells.  A small sampling of this information is located here, and a sample frack log, which presents details on injected volumes, pressures, rates, perforation intervals, etc. is presented here.

• Uses of Frack_It have included helping: a private equity firm evaluate the purchase of a coiled tubing company, a Fortune 100 firm accurately project drilling activity levels at the price lows of the last cycle, and provide accurate guidance on how fast, and in which areas, the subsequent rebound would play out.

• Mr. Severns is a thought leader for the Intelligent Oil Field (IOF) concept (also called Digital Oil Field of the Future (DOFF). He led the conceptual thinking and research on these topics while the Senior Director overseeing new oil field technologies at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA).  He has been interviewed by Offshore Engineer, as well as the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and AP news services about the IOF, and continues to stay abreast of how this concept has evolved over the years, and how it is currenlty being applied.  For some examples of the intelligent oil field in action, please go to this link

Oil and Gas Supply/Demand Fundamentals

• US Nonconventional Drilling/Completion Activity Portal- Data and information includes, rig counts, production levels, and activity maps.  Innovative use of our web based 3D graphics tool more easily and conveniently presents this market data.  (For those who might be interested, here are some other web based 3D examples that we have created to assist our clients.)

• Link to US Natural Gas Supply/Demand Fundamentals Page

• Link to Global LNG Supply/Demand Fundamentals Page

• Link to Global Oil Supply/Demand Fundamentals Page

• Key to our ability to differentially perform fundamentals analysis, especially for oil is our project database, in which we track major E&P projects from across the globe that we believe will contribute materially to oil supply. The database currently contains almost 2200 entries covering a 20 year span. This database provides us with the capability to:

  • Make reasonable estimates for the amount of oil supply entering the market for any given year covered by the database.

  • Segment the origination of new oil volumes by country, region, OPEC/nonOPEC, and type (e.g. deepwater, shale oil, bitumen, etc.).

  • Estimate global, average aggregate decline rates.

  • Put current trends and events into historical perspective.