A Realistic and Integrated Model for Evaluating Offshore Oil Development

Abstract

With the rising consumption of oil resources, major oil companies around the world have increasingly engaged in offshore oil exploration and development, and offshore oil resources have accounted for an increasing proportion. Offshore oil engineering projects are capital intensive, and the development of offshore oil fields faces a tough battle, especially in a period of low oil prices. Thus, a comprehensive evaluation model is highly needed to help assess economic benefits and provide meaningful and valuable information for operators and investors to make sensible decisions. This study firstly proposed a realistic and integrated evaluation model for offshore oil development based on actual historical project data. This evaluation model incorporated modules from the underwater system to the platform system and processes from oil reservoir extraction to oil, gas and water treatment. The uncertain parameters in the evaluation process are dealt with by sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo simulation. The proposed model is applied to a typical offshore oil development project in Bohai Bay, China. The results reveal that the recovery factor and oil price have the greatest impact on the economic benefits. In the case of deterministic analysis, the breakeven oil price of the project is 40.59 USD/bbl. After considering the uncertainty of project parameters, the higher the oil price, the greater the probability of NPV > 0. When the oil price is higher than 70 USD/bbl, even with uncertain project parameters, the probability of NPV > 0 can still be as high as 97.39%.