Schlumberger Releases Petrel Play-to-Prospect Risk Assessment

New Petrel Capabilities Delivered to Help De-risk Exploration Prospects

SAN ANTONIO, —Schlumberger today announced the release of the Play-to-Prospect Risk plug-in for the Petrel* E&P software platform. This technology offers an integrated petroleum-system-based assessment to consistently evaluate key risk elements from play to prospect.

“Statistics show that, on average, two of three frontier exploration wells today are unsuccessful, indicating that we as an industry still fail to properly manage exploration risk,” said Tony Bowman, president, Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS). “While seismic technology advances have enabled better evaluation of trap and reservoir risks, almost three-quarters of dry exploration wells are due to an inadequate understanding of charge and seal risk. With the new Play-to-Prospect Risk plug-in, oil and gas companies have a standardized process that integrates petroleum-system-based assessment to better understand charge and seal risk.”

The Play-to-Prospect Risk plug-in takes geological elements—trap, reservoir, charge and seal—and converts them into chance maps through a suite of transform methods. Scenarios are compared to determine play limits and identify areas for high grading to support rapid ranking of opportunities. The process seamlessly migrates from play-scale to prospect-level assessment, all within Petrel. This enables refinement of geological scenarios combined with chance of success—to deliver probabilistic hydrocarbon volumes.

Consistent workflows for play-to-prospect risk assessment across teams provide a standard method for evaluating study areas with a clear audit trail. The plug-in calculates the mean economic case for potential field development and the probabilistic economic resource case—based on the minimum economic reserve parameter for the geographic area. This enables effective portfolio management based on a clear understanding of risk and chance of success.

Petrel capabilities extended with WesternGeco technology

Complementing the exploration capabilities of the Play-to-Prospect Risk plug-in, the new Prestack Seismic Interpretation plug-in brings powerful WesternGeco technology to the Petrel platform to further refine understanding of petroleum system elements including charge, risk and trap definition. Geoscientists can analyze prestack gathers to better understand processing effects on post-stack data; evaluate response differences in offset traces to evaluate fluid effects; make on-the-fly offset stacks to create clearer partial stacks of interpretation targets; as well as interpreting and auto-tracking directly on pre-stack data for better horizon definition.

For more information, visit www.slb.com/petrel.

About Schlumberger

Schlumberger is the world’s leading supplier of technology, integrated project management and information solutions to customers working in the oil and gas industry worldwide. Employing approximately 110,000 people representing over 140 nationalities and working in approximately 80 countries, Schlumberger provides the industry’s widest range of products and services from exploration through production.

Schlumberger Limited has principal offices in Paris, Houston and The Hague and reported revenues of $27.45 billion in 2010. For more information, visit www.slb.com.


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*Mark of Schlumberger