Exprodat has announced the release of Unconventionals Analyst, an ArcGIS Desktop extension for planning and managing shale oil, shale gas and coal bed methane projects. Using Unconventionals Analyst geologists, petroleum engineers and reserves analysts can ensure compliant reserves and reduce drilling costs. The application runs as an extension to Esri’s ArcGIS Desktop tool. For further information see the Unconventionals Analyst page.
Every petroleum company must have an accurate picture of their portfolio of proved, probable and possible reserve areas, not least for declaring reserves to financial regulators. Unconventionals Analyst enables companies to estimate reserve areas using industry standard map-based classification schemes.
Reserve classification methods supported by the tool include the Petroleum Resources Management System (PRMS) developed by the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), and the Canadian Oil and Gas Evaluation Handbook (COGEH) developed by the Society of Petroleum Evaluation Engineers (SPEE).
Uniquely, Unconventionals Analyst provides tools to automate SPEE’s “Monograph 3 – Guidelines for the Practical Evaluation of Undeveloped Reserves in Resource Plays” statistical methods for determining proved areas of a resource play.
Drilling for unconventional resources often raises issues in well pad positioning due to land ownership, environmental sensitivities or human developments. Unconventionals Analyst enables companies to plan drilling sites around these constraints and to identify the most efficient well pad pattern for draining an area. The complex spatial analysis algorithms that drive this are flexible enough to incorporate pre-existing and ‘must-drill’ wells, and have been shown to reduce the number of wells required to exploit a field.
Exprodat’s Technical Director, Chris Jepps, says, “We developed Unconventionals Analyst in partnership with a leading global integrated gas company and it has been used extensively in a range of unconventional projects. We are delighted to be able to bring this innovative product to market, so that more companies can benefit from significant project cost savings by streamlining their reserves management workflows and geospatially optimizing well pad patterns – so important in these cost sensitive unconventionals projects.”
Exprodat’s software suite is made up of a number of extensions to Esri’s ArcGIS Desktop that provide ‘out-of-the-box’ functionality designed specifically for the needs of the petroleum sector. The software is data independent and allows oil and gas companies to integrate vendor data with in-house datasets for use in GIS-based spatial analysis.
For additional information on Exprodat’s software please visit the software page.