New SEC Rules: What is New for the Petrophysicist?

Abstract

Abstract The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the United States of North America has modernized in December 2008 its regulations for the report of oil and gas reserves. From now on, the oil and gas companies will be able to report reserves of bituminous sands, the economic evaluation of reserves will be made with an yearly average price instead of the price of the last day of the year, the use of (reliable) technology will be allowed to demonstrate the producibility and the (lateral) continuity of production of the reservoirs as well as to determine the fluid contacts. Also, it will be authorized to publish, voluntarily, probable and possible reserves that previously were explicitly prohibited in the SEC reports. One of the important changes that concern to the petrophysicist is the qualification of Reliable Technology to support or demonstrate the producibility of the reservoirs without having a conclusive test. Using technology the petrophysicist will also be involved in fluid contacts determination and in the construction of analogy of the reservoir of interest with other reservoirs at a more advanced stage of development. The use of reliable technology is also enabled to support the estimate of proved undeveloped reserves at greater distances than the development spacing in the field provided that reasonable certainty of the production continuity is obtained by using such technology. The intrinsic technical uncertainty in reserves estimations often makes the estimators to adopt a probabilistic estimate instead of a deterministic one. The use of probabilistic estimates has become frequent in the industry and now the SEC has defined that estimates of proved reserves can be made either deterministically or probabilistically. When a probabilistic estimate is chosen, or when in occasions the petrophysical parameters of an in essence deterministic estimate (net thickness, porosity and saturation of water) are chosen based on a probabilistic approach of the distribution of those parameters, the petrophysicist will have to observe some basic premises to avoid misinterpretations. Also, in the next years, operators and service providers will be embarked in an effort to find new tools and methodologies for reservoir evaluation and reserves estimation that allow them to value their properties with reasonable certainty still at the early stages of development. This will take place under a modernized regulatory framework that will enable the use of the most modern technologies provided that they can offer consistent, repetitive, and reasonably certain results on the expected answer of the reservoir.