Managing reservoir uncertainty in petroleum field development: Defining a flexible production strategy from a set of rigid candidate strategies

Abstract Decisions in petroleum field development are typically complex because of high investments under high uncertainty. To improve project performance, decision makers study the effects of uncertainty and consider actions to both mitigate risks and exploit upsides. Uncertainty can be managed with flexibility, which has high potential to manage the long-term systems in petroleum field development, reacting to uncertainty as it unfolds over time. Although increasingly popular in the petroleum industry, the literature still lacks systematic, objective approaches to quantitatively estimate the expected value of flexibility (EVoF). This work sets out a decision structure applied to petroleum field development that (1) uses a predefined set of rigid candidate production strategies (robust and specialized strategies) to define the flexible strategy, (2) establishes probabilistic-based implementation rules, and (3) improves estimates of EVoF by both accounting for the purpose of flexibility (to mitigate the risks or exploit the upsides of uncertainty) and weighting the decision maker's attitude. We show that our proposed method is applicable to complex reservoirs in the development phase, with multiple uncertainties affecting the production strategy selection. Finally, we assessed the effects of delayed implementation on EVoF.