Opportunities Identification Workshop and Follow-up

Opportunity identification and framing is used to evaluate large projects and assets. It is mainly used as part of the Hydrocarbon Maturation Process and Industry Project Management. It supports a system of Decision Gates and Integrated Project Assurance Reviews.

For a mature asset, various initiatives need to be developed to keep the production on plateau. For this, the following projects could be considered: workover, infill drilling, de-bottleneck facilities, EOR, and near field exploration.

During an Opportunity Identification and Framing workshop the asset team brainstorms ideas and matures them with the help of the expert facilitator. The workshop starts with a steer on future technological, production and financial targets. After this step, a thorough overview (grounding) of the asset is presented to the team. This is done for subsurface, wells and the surface facilities. Upon the completion of the grounding, the definition of success for the next 15 years is determined. From this the critical success factors are derived.

The following step is the generation of ideas during a brainstorm session. The proposed ideas are clustered into projects and subsequently ranked according to value and do-ability. After the ranking the top projects are taken further. The lower ranking projects/ideas are documented for reference. Normally 3 to 5 projects make it to the next phase. In this phase, the critical decisions are determined per project.

Three types of decisions are distinguished:

– Givens, decisions that already have been taken

– Focused decisions that must be taken in the next project phase/time frame

– Tactical decisions that can be addressed later

All these decisions are identified during a brainstorm session with the asset team and its experts. These decisions are used to build the project framework or roadmap. In this case, 4 projects were identified, leading to a combined roadmap which is used as project framework. The supporting work actions together with the decision points make up the project plan.